Carol Real: How does literature serve as a catalyst for your artistic practice, and how does it influence your creative output? Can you share examples of specific literary works that have inspired your art?
Alexandra Grant: When I was a graduate student studying drawing and painting at the California College of the Arts, the main question that preoccupied me was finding a stream of ideas that would both interest me in the long term and be the intellectual bedrock for my artistic career. I asked myself what I liked to do when no one was looking and what I liked to do when everyone was looking. What I enjoyed thinking about in my life to that point and what I would imagine enjoying for the rest of my life. The answer was literature and reading. So I began my career using painting to represent and interpret literature, poetry, and writers I admired. It’s what I still do today. My early text-based works examined poems by Pablo Neruda and Wislawa Symborszka. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, I searched out living writers interested in an exchange. That’s when my collaboration with hypertext pioneer Michael Joyce began. I have had the pleasure and privilege of engaging with a diverse group of writers and thinkers, from James Joyce to Hélène Cixous, from Szymborksa to living Polish writers such as Anna Adamowicz, Krystyna Dąbrowska, Julia Fiedorczuk, Bianka Rolando, Olga Tokarczuk, and Urszula Zajączkowska.
