Alice Maher is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists. Since the 1980’s her work has been working within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Her work involves many different media including painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography and installation. Maher is a prominent figure in the feminist movement in Ireland. She was one of the founding members of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Repeal the Eighth Amendment. Her work has consistently reflected the social and political climate of the times.
In response to a recent body of work entitled Vox Materia (2018), Rachel Botha, Circa wrote;
Maher is exploring the sensorial movement of the body, with her own body. The process begins with the taking of sequential photographs of the artist’s body in movement, nothing is posed of consciously conducted With a curated focus of the body in motion, the artist has forgotten herself, the camera lens and the potential viewer. Furthermore, by extracting the image’s outline and obscuring the owner from its body, Maher has distilled an intangible experience. A hybrid is created where solidity is found in the transitory, like attempting to write down forgotten words. The bronze sculptural forms and wood reliefs emulate the sensational expressions of an individual’s interiority, there is no influence from an exterior source, nothing is objectified and there is no ‘thingness’. A terms borrowed from Maggie Nelson to describe society’s portrayal of women, a being devoid of complexity, a mere thing.