Alexandra Harley is a British sculptor best known for her immersive engagement with materials.

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Harley studied sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art under Glyn Williams and Robin Greenwood, followed by the Advanced Course at St. Martins School of Art under Tim Scott. Her own teaching career is extensive, commencing with woodcarving in the Sculpture Department at City Lit in 1985 and over the years expanding into bronze, stone and life modelling.

Harley is the Ashurst Emerging Artist Sculpture Prize winner for 2021. She has been awarded prestigious fellowships in Japan and the USA, won the the Brian Mercer Fellowship in 2016, spending 3 months in the Mariani Bronze Foundry in Italy. Juried exhibitions for which she has been selected include the ING Discerning Eye, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Society of Sculptors Summer Exhibition, Creekside Open, Cork Street Open and the London Group Open. She has also had public sculptures commissioned in the Caribbean, Europe and the USA.

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Harley currently splits her time between her studios in Stratford, London and Framlingham, Suffolk.

I am delighted and honoured to have been given the sculpture award by the  Ashurst Prize with my sculpture Adaxka, above.

https://www.madeinbed.co.uk/aeap-x-mib/ashurst-emerging-artist-prize-2021

The solo exhibition was on December 2021 - January 7th 2022, at Ashurst's Emerging Artist Gallery, in London. Ashurst, London Fruit & Wool Exchange, Duval Square, London E1 6PW, UK . 

An Excerpt from a review of my Solo exhibition by Sofia Carreira- Wham..

The headquarters of Ashurst LLP in London’s Spitalfields have been transformed, suddenly inhabited by a vast and vibrant array of sculptures that are immediately recognisable as the work of Alexandra Harley. Harley is the 2021 winner of the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize for Sculpture and this is her largest solo exhibition to date, featuring eleven artworks spanning a creative period of the last six years.

The exhibition has a personal, intimate feel that is reinforced when I learn that it has been curated by the artist herself, both in terms of the selection of artworks and their display. The pieces are installed alongside one another in a linear fashion, enabling the viewer to take in one, some or all of them in a single gaze as well as from disparate vantage points. This unusual layout facilitates a physical and contemplative journey through years and layers of Harley’s artistic practice, encouraging a non-static experience of sculptures that are themselves characterised by movement.

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This Stuff Matters has been selected for an exhibition at showing at the APT Gallery, Deptford, London SE8 4SA. This will take place in March 2023. There will be a chaired discussion with Meghan Goodeve, 'Women in Abstraction' 

https://www.aptstudios.org/

www.stuff-matters.co.uk

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The online show made during Lockdown and curated by Jill Gibson can be found at:

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTykvXmbeM0&feature=youtu.be 

I exhibited Birika in 'Coming up for Air', a London Group exhibition at Waterloo in 2021, that can now be viewed as a fly-though, please see the video below. The close up shot of Birika is at 00:03:02

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There is an additional shorter video of 5 minutes, which you can find here:

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https://youtu.be/mnbN9Buj4yE

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This Stuff Matters is a collective of four established women sculptors: Alexandra Harley, Gillian Brent, Sheila Vollmer and Jill Gibson. They first met as a group in 2019, participating in an experimental mixed group show Testing 123..... at Unit 3 in London, curated by John Bunker. They have an exciting program of events at the next exhibition in the APT Gallery in Deptford South London in March 2023. Please visit This Stuff Matters for further information.

Installation views: Opening Matters, a group exhibition by This Stuff Matters (January 2019). Photography by Peter Griffiths.