Alexandra Hughes’ practice brings the photographic image together with sculptural material and performative gesture. Hughes describes her processes as ‘wilding’; tactile and disruptive. In constructing installations Hughes looks to rupture the boundaries of representation, material and imagination.
Hughes received her MFA (Fine Art Media) at The Slade School of Fine Art (2008) and PhD from Northumbria University (2019); her practice-based research entitled, Wilding Photographs: Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography.
Solo exhibitions include: Interior Dreams: from the belly and the earth, 36 Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (2025), Tender Kaleidescape, Newcastle Cathedral, Newcastle upon Tyne (2022), Letting Things Be Uncertain, South Hill Park, Bracknell (2017) , figuring it, Roaming ROOM Artspace, London (2016), Arrangements, Siobhan Davies Studios, London (2010).
Selected group shows include: Hinterlands, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2022), Artists in the Field, Royal Geographical Society, London (2019), Arthouses, Whitley Bay (2019), Liquid Land, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge (2018), ROTOR, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2010), freshfacedandwildeyed09, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2009)
Recent Text:
Press Release:
Alex Hughes: Interior Dreams - from the belly and the earth
36 Gallery
8th November – 16th November 2025 / Saturday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm
Interior Dreams - from the belly and the earth is a solo exhibition by Newcastle-based artist Alex Hughes. Hughes works across photography, collage, painting, textiles and sculpture with a poetic and intuitive visual language. Visitors to the gallery enter a spatial collage rendered in a muted floral palette, shot through with stark swathes of blood-red. Works hang on the walls and from the ceiling beams; they thrust upwards and trail out from the floor. A layered collage of suspended fabric and clear plastic strips runs from ceiling to floor. Printed on the fabrics are Hughes’ photographs; one of light hitting a body of water, and the other, of reflected light photographed at sunrise. Hughes uses photography to mediate between the landscapes of our external and internal worlds, transferring representative imagery into malleable materiality. The intangibility of light, time and water are held in photographic form and then transmuted into the fluidity of fabric that hangs and wraps within the work. Intricate photographic collages on light boxes teeter between representation and imagination. In one, a spiralling shape in red, mirrored in formation by fragments of water, vegetation, petal and stamen-like forms, encloses a shell, evoking organs of human reproduction – a womb, a placenta. The red tendrils appear again in the hanging collage, layered against printed textiles, and in vinyl across the floor, like an artery running through the body of Hughes’ work. In contrast to the structural weight of the lightboxes and bold colouring in the photographic collages, softly hued paintings on paper, printed textiles and photographs are collaged and delicately layered against another wall. An assemblage of mainly paintings, hanging low to the ground, conjures a garden. Twisting green stems and frilled pink petals are set against rhythmic, waved lines. Nestled against the greenery is a small black and white photograph with a painted border; of the artist’s baby son. Sculptures, consisting of sticks wrapped in fabric printed with repeated patterns extracted from Hughes’ lilting paintings, grow like plant stems from the gallery floor.
Throughout the exhibition, repeating motifs of half-familiar shapes and forms – watery, human, vegetative –and photographs of the artist’s children, conjure our deepest and most sticky-tender states of being. Woven together by the rhythms and gestures across Hughes’ expansive body of work, Interior Dreams - from the belly and the earth evokes a subliminal sense of the entwined roots that connect human and more than human life. Alexandra Hughes’ practice brings the photographic image together with sculptural material and performative gesture. Hughes describes her processes as ‘wilding’; tactile and disruptive. In constructing installations Hughes looks to rupture the boundaries of representation, material and imagination.
Hughes’ recent projects include Hinterlands, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2022), Tender Kalediscape, Newcastle upon Tyne (2022), Bridging The Distance, Four Corners Gallery, London (2021), Talking Photography: Reality Check, Birkbeck University, London (2017). Hughes’ academic achievements include a PhD, Northumbria University (2019) and a MFA, The Slade School of Fine Art (2008). Hughes is a lecturer at Newcastle University and Richmond American University London.
Text by Nathalie Boobis.
Press Release:
Tender Kaleidescape at Newcastle Cathedral
May 2022
Alexandra has created a kaleidoscopic journey through the Nave of printed and painted expressive imagery and you are invited to take time to walk through, explore and contemplate Tender Kaleidescape.
The spring equinox and the matrescence (the physical and psychological transition to becoming a mother) are themes which flow alongside captured, ephemeral qualities of water, air and light in a spatial and visual collage.
Alexandra considered symbolism and architecture within the Cathedral. A stitched emblem of a mother pelican plucking feathers from her chest to feed her chicks her blood at a time of drought, denoting the depths of a mother’s love and an act of self-sacrifice, resonated with Alexandra.
Tender Kaleidescape includes recent paintings (on paper and photographs) created during Alexandra’s transition into motherhood, seen in abstract and figurative imagery, including glimpses of her own daughter. These works hang alongside photographs and patterns on fabrics. The video piece and the vivid colour palette of blue, purple and pink seen throughout the installation come from a white wall, sky and river photographed and recorded on the Spring Equinox. This point in the year is when day and night, dark and light, are in equal balance, marking the start of spring – the season of new life, growth and renewal.
Extracted forms from stained glass windows within the Cathedral (including one made by female artist Caroline Townsend) were further sources of inspiration for the bold, playful shapes within the installation.