collaborative solo exhibition
The Middle Room, Los Angeles, CA USA
August 16th- September 14th, 2025
https://www.themiddleroomgallery.com/exhibitions
The Middle Room is pleased to present Stitched and Stained, the debut collaborative solo exhibit of artist duo Heather Beardsley and Alexandra Carter. The exhibition will be on view from August 16 - September 14, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, August 16, from 6-8pm.
Stitched and Stained is a new body of work, created collaboratively by Alexandra Carter and Heather Beardsley, that mines the mythology of the monstrous feminine to meditate on societal control over women’s bodies, as well as the artists’ personal relationships to female fertility. Carter begins the work by drawing the figures with cranberry juice on antique, hand-embroidered linens such as old napkins and handkerchiefs—a technique that speaks to her background growing up on a cranberry farm. Beardsley then embroiders the pieces in response to the drawings, adding a new textural dimension to accentuate or disguise parts of the original image. This series features images of mythological female monsters, such as deities, goddesses and demonesses captured in moments of transformation into animal or plant hybrids—who historically almost always lack agency in these transitions, as rather it’s something done to them. This subject matter resonates with the artists’ choice to represent these images on second-hand textiles, as textile art has been systematically excluded from the Western art canon, because it was made primarily by women in the home. Carter and Beardsley consider the women that originally embroidered these sourced fabrics as their anonymous collaborators, and exhibiting them in fine art spaces as a way of reinserting them into art history, while furthering contemporary art discourse around female bodies and “feminine craft.”
The monstrous feminine, originally theorized by Barbara Creed, encompasses stories from mythology and horror where female bodies are rendered grotesque, uncontrollable and threatening, made terrifying by their defiance of easy categorization—transformed from a “woman” into a “monster” the moment her existence challenges societal norms.
The Middle Room is open Saturdays & Sundays from 1-3pm--for press and sales inquiries & private viewings, contact [email protected]
Stitched and Stained is a new body of work, created collaboratively by Alexandra Carter and Heather Beardsley, that mines the mythology of the monstrous feminine to meditate on societal control over women’s bodies, as well as the artists’ personal relationships to female fertility. Carter begins the work by drawing the figures with cranberry juice on antique, hand-embroidered linens such as old napkins and handkerchiefs—a technique that speaks to her background growing up on a cranberry farm. Beardsley then embroiders the pieces in response to the drawings, adding a new textural dimension to accentuate or disguise parts of the original image. This series features images of mythological female monsters, such as deities, goddesses and demonesses captured in moments of transformation into animal or plant hybrids—who historically almost always lack agency in these transitions, as rather it’s something done to them. This subject matter resonates with the artists’ choice to represent these images on second-hand textiles, as textile art has been systematically excluded from the Western art canon, because it was made primarily by women in the home. Carter and Beardsley consider the women that originally embroidered these sourced fabrics as their anonymous collaborators, and exhibiting them in fine art spaces as a way of reinserting them into art history, while furthering contemporary art discourse around female bodies and “feminine craft.”
The monstrous feminine, originally theorized by Barbara Creed, encompasses stories from mythology and horror where female bodies are rendered grotesque, uncontrollable and threatening, made terrifying by their defiance of easy categorization—transformed from a “woman” into a “monster” the moment her existence challenges societal norms.
The Middle Room is open Saturdays & Sundays from 1-3pm--for press and sales inquiries & private viewings, contact [email protected]
Exhibition Press
You can read our full interview with Kristine Schomaker, from artandcakela here.