Alexa is a studio artist at the Old Fire Station in Oxford.

Stories are troublemakers. Storytellers are powerful.

My practice is built on the idea of the artist as storyteller. This most recent studio enquiry builds on my research into the nature of narrative, lines and stories as troublemakers. I am interested in the dialogue between play and menace, exploration and discovery, inside and out. By working on multiple surfaces and in series, I play with chronology and manifestations of the book. I am interested in the process of re-reading and re-tracing lines and how this allows us to create stories which shape our future experience.

Books, and a departure almost exclusively to working on paper has changed the nature of these pages. They are not illustrations. The figures inhabit the space inside the book where the story has yet to be written. Gestural marks mirror the marks traced in the air by the storyteller; these create a landscape in the anatomy of the book which the storytellers can explore. Portals emerge, figures disappear and weave between the gestures.

The significance of hair, representing woven threads and connections, acknowledges the traditional gathering of women to make and share their stories. This is also an exploration of migration, children moving from place to place without barriers of land or language. They carry the stories that they encounter on their journeys as they move from page to page.

2019 exhibition: The Future Library

2019 exhibition: Practice – A Collective Conversation