Alice Maher
Using different media, the root of which remains drawing, Alice Maher delves into ancestral history, myths and the subconscious. She seeks to understand who we are and where we come from.
She champions the place of the female body in symbiosis with the animal and vegetable worlds.
When she entered the art world in the 1980s, Alice Maher discovered the impertinence of artists like Louise Bourgeois and Helen Chadwick, which encouraged her to not only talk about feminism, but also more widely about the problems of domination and colonialism. Her landscapes thus bear witness to her native Ireland, a country that was despoiled and whose language was forbidden and replaced… If her work takes on a committed and political role, it also refers to what is buried, or even concealed, deep Inside us. “I come from a rural background, from farming, and we had a different relationship with landscape. To us it was a work area, so I have no romantic notions at all about landscape,” she explains. “I consider the landscape to be inside me, rather than outside me. I'm interested in a relationship with the landscape as an animal, as a human being, an animal. It is related to a kind of colonialism, this whole thing of claiming land and claiming whose land it is, but also reclaiming land. So there’s some point there about reclaiming space for yourself, as a human, as a woman as well.” At the heart of this vast history and this mythology with which she is so familiar, she interprets the stories of Mary Magdalene and Cassandra, multiplies tongues or masses of long hair, and summons us to rethink the concept of belief.
In Maher’s work, the weight of the world may also be depicted in a literal manner, in which a human being starts to metamorphose into various animals or earthbound roots. She is pleased that today the notions of fluidity, respect for a broader sense of life and interspecies have impressed themselves upon society. “Real life” meets that which she has depicted in her drawings for decades. Her working method is energetic, often using large formats, drawing in charcoal, stepping back, rubbing out, recommencing, leaving traces of her pentimenti… so as to better accompany her thought processes. “People think you’re just accessing your subconscious, but it’s not really that. It’s more like a conscious allowing, allowing of the subconscious to work,” she concludes. The subjects are sometimes delicately reworked in small formats in pencil, developing between the interior and exterior of the bodies.
They are often in the centre of the sheet, surrounded by a generous blank area, which the artist describes as a suspended space. Each of them seems to be searching for this space that perhaps contains the truth about what we are.
(texte de Marie Maertens).
