STITCHED AND STAINED

COLLABORATIVE SOLO EXHIBITION
AUGUST 16-SEPTEMBER 14, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 6-8PM

ARTIST TALK+BOOK LAUNCH: SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 1PM

SOLO DEBUT OF ARTIST DUO HEATHER BEARDSLEY+ALEXANDRA CARTER

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 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 and an artist talk and book launch for the release of their catalog will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 1pm.

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.” 

Heather Beardsley (b. 1987, Virginia Beach, VA) is a Virginia-based artist creating mixed-media projects in response to environmental issues. Beardsley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She spent 2016 in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects International Artist Fellowship by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany. Other residencies include KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv, Ukraine; and La Box in Bourges, France. Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid and Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands. In 2023 she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, while in summer 2024 she had a solo exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and an art residency at Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Alexandra Carter (b. 1985, Boston, MA) is a California–based artist creating paintings that explore themes of fertility, maternity, and transformation, often drawing on her upbringing on a cranberry farm in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2015), and a BA from Rhodes College (2009). Her recent solo exhibitions include The Middle Room and Luna Anaïs Gallery (both Los Angeles), Rogers Gallery (Las Vegas), the University of Minnesota (St. Paul), and Oolong Gallery (San Diego), with additional solo shows at Fusion Gallery (Turin, Italy), Southfork (Memphis), Proyecto’ace Foundation (Buenos Aires), and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Carter has participated in numerous residencies, including the Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence (Finland), KulturKontakt Austria (Vienna), Rogers Art Loft (Las Vegas), Qwatz (Rome), Inaudita (Turin), Vice~Versa Foundation (Goa, India), the Kentucky Foundation for Women (Prospect, KY), and Graniti Murales (Sicily).

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