Alice Maher,The Bird Mistress (for janet), 2020
Drawn Out - Drawing Room
17 July – 22 August 2021
The five artists included in this exhibition - Kate Lyddon, Alice Maher, Richard Mark Rawlins, Caroline Wong and Joel Wyllie - are using the slow processes of drawing to work through deeply personal experiences, anxieties, and desires. Drawing is agile enough to move across different periods of the artists’ lives: backwards, to recollected experiences; inwards, to excavate things that are hidden or obscured; and forwards, to new forms that arise through the process. Ostensibly modest practices - drawing, erasing, redrawing – can produce unimaginable beings and worlds that can surprise even their makers.
In a new series of large drawings, titled The Bird Mistress (2020-1), Alice Maher uses the body – her body – as a vessel to explore inner sensations and worlds. The process of drawing, erasing and redrawing is a search for a particular atmosphere or energy which articulates inchoate feelings and sensations. Much of Maher’s work draws on mythology; in this series, the bird-like imagery is used to suggest a connection between our world and that of beyond – a way also for the artist to process the recent loss of two of her closest friends.
