Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon's monumental textile sculpture The Map was recently reviewed for The Brooklyn Rail by Rebecca Schiffman.
The Map is currently showing at the Irish Arts Centre in New York until September 29th 2024.
An extract from the review:
"Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon’s The Map, on view at the Irish Arts Center, cartographizes the institutionalization and incarceration of women throughout Irish history. The work literally maps landscapes of oppression and resistance that have shaped women’s lives, highlighting events and legislation including the Public Dance Halls Act (1935), which sought to restrict dances without clerical oversight; the hidden history of the Magdalene Laundries, Church-run and for-profit workhouse institutions that confined “fallen women” for over two centuries; the incarceration of women under the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–86) due to suspected venereal diseases; and the long history of abortion in Ireland, only legalized in 2018. These and many other histories are personified or portrayed as countries, cities, mountain ranges, bodies of water, crests, and constellations that are hand-sewn, embroidered, and painted onto the massive, 21 by 15 foot textile sculpture, which took the artists over three years to complete. The Map (2021) is a triumph that merges artistic skill with righteous political activism, challenges the myth of progress, and reveals the intricate, often painful, realities that continue to define the struggle for women’s rights in Ireland and that reverberate globally."
