Carrie Reichardt

Working as a self-titled ‘craftivist’, Carrie Reichardt is an outspoken, politically charged, and ceramic-slinging artist. Leaving a trail of poetry and prose in her wake, Reichardt employs the techniques of a muralist, but the tools of a mosaic artist, screen printing her own tiles to use rather than paint. Carrie has been involved in the community and public art projects for two decades, designing and consulting on large-scale mosaic murals in various local communities. She has produced a community mosaic in Miravalle, one of the most deprived districts on the fringes of Mexico City as well as projects in Argentina and Chile.

In 2018, Reichardt finally completed the transformation of her west London home into a giant mosaic mural – a process that took twenty years and tens of thousands of tiles to complete. In 2013, Carrie Reichardt won the prestigious Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to research ‘How to advance community mosaics in the UK’. Her public work is very much based on presenting history where it happens, making site-specific work that shows visually the people’s history. Conceptually, Carrie Reichardt protests by deed visual activism -the Tiki Love Truck (2007), Trojan Horse (2011), a living statue of suffragist Mary Bamber (2011) now on permanent display at the Liverpool Museum – are works that typify and reflect the artists’ core concerns: systemic injustice, cruelty, social activism.

She trained at Kingston University and achieved a First Class degree in Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan. She was Artist in Residence at Camberwell Art College in 2009, The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, USA 2014, and is currently an artist in a residence with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Reichardt is frequently called to speak on the use of craft and art as protest and has presented at the Museum of Liverpool, Victoria and Albert Museum, ICA, Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.