Carrie Reichardt gained a First Class degree in Fine Art at Leeds University and has had a career spanning many disciplines including film, performance and sculpture. She is perhaps best known as a mosaicist, working internationally on large-scale public murals, often as a lead festival artist.
Reichardt’s public work reflects her sustained engagement with people, place and politics. She draws on local archival sources to create works that resonate with the communities they are set within. She has described her work as a form of “ceramic tapestry” – weaving local people and their histories together. In its radical permanence, her street-based work has a temporality that stands in contrast to the ephemerality of other forms of street art.
Carrie Reichardt is regularly invited to speak about the use of craft and art as protest, and her skills have been put to good use as a vehicle for her own political activism, most notably her campaigning for prisoners on Death Row and her involvement with the fight to gain justice for the Angola 3. Despite having a rebellious streak, it is testament to her talent that Reichardt was awarded the Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 2013, enabling her to work with local communities in Chile and Mexico. She was also recently Artist in Residence at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.