Zierle & Carter 2006-2010

Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carter’s collaborative work is interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and site and context responsive spanning performance, happenings, interventions, sound, video and installation. Through their practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human both as individuals and as a ‘collective entity’. Their work addresses notions of belonging, cultural identity, the dynamics within relationships, harmony through conflict and the transformation of limitations.

Their work adopts a simple yet rich visual aesthetic, which employs various approaches and guises with often an element of surprise and improvisation. The work fundamentally explores society’s conventions, traditions and rituals both old and new, often flipping them on their head, peeling them back, reversing orders and disrupting the norm. Zierle and Carter’s work sites an embodied investigation into human interactions with their immediate environment and exemplifies a profound curiosity of the unknown, the void and the instant, namely ‘the now’.

At times charged with raw unedited energy and at others, sensitive, composed and sincere, their work initiates contemplation and prompts us to reconsider the way we perceive the foundations that our society and individual realities are based upon. Their work acts as an invitation to venture into the spaces that lie in-between the external and internal, the permanent and transient, the spoken and unheard.

Zierle & Carter have investigated sense of belonging and displacement within various communities, from refugees and first nation people in Canada, Welsh communities in Patagonia, to migrant workers in Cornwall. Their work examined the apple as a symbol of love and knowledge, provided an interactive public purging service in response to communication breakdowns among businesses, buried attachments to lost/faded relationships, and celebrated existing and future connections. Recent works probed consumerism and the notion of stuffing the ‘inner void’, as well as explored our physical absence by leaving instructions behind for participants in an empty cinema to engage in a love story. Current works experiment with intimacy, proximity, and one to one encounters in public by stretching the space and energy transference between two people.

Shifting in format, content and duration, their works have varied in length, from a series of short actions to three day durational works and week long intensives. At times publically visible and others remote and discreet, their work has explored one to one interactive and instruction based performances in cupboards and empty cinemas, social sculptures in indoor markets and busy shopping areas, process and object led actions in tunnels and World War 2 bunkers, as well as interventions on Volcanoes, desserts, hot springs and at the base of a glacier.