Alexandra Hunts tries to disturb the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate forms of knowledge. Each of her projects starts with a long and entangled research into a topic, which often leads to a complex discord of social, historical and political narratives. As a way of coming closer to the essence of the matter Hunts often uses repetition, reproduction and manual labour, taking it to such lengths that it almost becomes an obsession.
For her recent project carbon-14 Hunts draws on several distinct historical narratives and merges them into one story. The investigation starts at the pencil factory, which used to be a stone’s throw away from her apartment in Malmö. The story behind the disappearing production of pencils gave her inspiration to dig deeper into the history, the material and the scientific ‘facts’. She built a timeline of development and history, making three stops: the prehistoric period, the industrial revolution and the period of high technology. This project deals with cycles of use, the surprising transformations of everyday things and the constant reinvention of material. It traces the path from ‘pure’ material to the high-tech materials of the future and back.
With carbon-14 Alexandra Hunts tries to bring structure and understanding to a varied array of materials including: drawings, photographs, sculptures, and pure materials as Siberian larch wood, scotch tape, graphite, charcoal and graphene, the newest form of carbon.