Alexandria Coe: Under a Hot Sun

Made up of cascading paper rolls that feature studies of the female figure resonant through the artist’s practice, Alexandria Coe’s Under a Hot Sun centres itself amidst nakedness – understood as a raw, yearning to be closer to the sense of self. For the first time, Coe has extended her signature, minimal style into the large-scale installation – paper that reaches both earth and sky. Picturing languid, relaxed forms – “as if looking up at a hot sun – at an origin of all” – the artist explores the vulnerability of the very surfaces she investigates – an unclothed body as a body without social norms and boundaries, drawing what’s left, what lingers when stripped bare with all the walls exposed.
Creating a form that is imperfect and unfinished, yet fully alive, Coe is looking to unravel a fragile structure – something unlaboured and natural, the opposite to the complete, over-edited form; approach that continues into a series of smaller compositions on paper.