Carrie Reichardt is a self-titled ‘craftivist’ whose work often blurs the boundaries between craft and activism. She has had a career spanning many media, including film, performance and sculpture but is perhaps best known as a ceramicist and mosaicist working internationally on large-scale public murals.
Her recent work includes Voodoo Zulu Liberation Taxi, displayed at Coventry Transport Museum, which raises awareness about the inhumane treatment of prisoners held in solitary confinement and death rows. Other prominent public artworks include Dada the Trojan Horse, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; Disobedient Objects for the V&A, and Mary Bamber – a Revolutionary Woman for the Museum of Liverpool. Her most recently commissioned community project with The Treatment Rooms Collective is a ceramic mural in the new Acton Gardens development, titled Tree of Life. She was awarded the Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 2013 to advance the craft of community mosaics working with local communities in Chile and Mexico.
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.
As part of her participation in Nuart Aberdeen 2018, Reichardt collaborated with global human rights organisation Amnesty International on their BRAVE campaign, which aims to recognise and support human rights defenders around the world. In this case recognising women human rights defenders in the UK carrying forward the ‘Suffragette Spirit’ on the 100th anniversary of the first women to receive the right to vote.
Reichardt 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, and in 2016 she was the International Artist-in-Residence for the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, USA. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Reichardt is frequently called to speak on the use of craft and art as protest and has presented at conferences and events around the world. This includes being invited as a Key Note speaker at the Mosaic Association of Australia and New Zealand Symposium in Melbourne, Australia; and invitations to address the Society of America Mosaic Artists Annual Conference in Philadelphia, USA and the British Association of Modern Mosaic forum at the V&A, London.