The Ridge Salon 1
Alexa Reid
Breast Nest (2025)
BreastNest (2025, Video Installation)
collected discarded nesting materials from House Sparrows, gold embroidery thread, muslin cloth, video.
Since moving to our current home in 2017, we have shared the space with a family of House Sparrows (passer domesticus) nesting in the eaves. Prompted by the invitation to The Ridge Salon and the stimulus of the Dawn Chorus, I began observing our House Sparrows with greater intention, listening to their chirps, chirrups and churs, observing their movements, nest-building activities, and the biparental feeding of their altricial young. I became especially interested in the acoustic feedback loop between nestling and parent birds: the chicks cheep to signal hunger, and the parent birds provide food, forming a natural call-and-response system. This behaviour parallels the human breastfeeding dyad, where infant suckling triggers hormonal responses leading to milk release or the ‘the let-down’. These reflections form the basis of BreastNest, a film installation exploring interspecies systems of care, corporeal communication, and inter-dependency.​​​
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Biography
Alexa is a cross-disciplinary artist and teacher, working at the intersections between theatre, live art, and installation. Her practice currently explores archives and collections, site/place, folk and mythological narratives, ecology, and the convergence of body, science, and the humanities, with a particular interest in matrescence. As a mother of 4 children Alexa’s practice and pedagogy is heavily inspired and informed by the lived experience of mothering. Alexa’s methodology incorporates drawing, collecting, object-based dramaturgies, performative costume, and multisensory immersion, often developed in response to and for specific sites.
Alexa’s work has been commissioned and presented nationally and internationally, including collaborations with Artangel, Artsadmin, The Horniman Museum, Cricoteka (Krakow), Teatro Garibaldi (Palermo), Punchdrunk, The Whitechapel Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC). A founding member and former co-artistic director of Lotos Collective (2006–2011), Alexa has developed projects in diverse sites and locations such as a former Austrian salt mine, a medieval German castle, a deconsecrated Neapolitan church, and an Augustinian Abbey on Inchcolm Island, Scotland.
Alexa has taught widely in Higher Education settings including Central Saint Martins, Rose Bruford College, Brunel University, the University of Guelph (Canada), and Università Agrigento (Sicily), and has been a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, since 2012.
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@alexareidstudio