Alice Maher: A woman’s voice
Alice Maher was inspired by a carving of a manacled mermaid in an Irish abbey.
She tells how it fed into themes around the female condition for her new exhibition at the Crawford.
Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Little Mermaid is a lot darker and bloodier than the sanitised version served up by Disney.
Falling in love with her human prince, Andersen’s mermaid enters a pact with a sea witch that requires her to cut out her tongue.
She spends the rest of her short life ashore, robbed of her voice, unable to explain herself to her true love or to express the agonies she endures to walk on land.
Alice Maher was reminded of the tale while visiting her native county of Tipperary while in the process of arranging her latest exhibition, Vox Materia; she stumbled upon a curious 12th century relief of a landlocked mermaid in Kilcooley Abbey.
“This mermaid had a manacle around her tail, so she was tied to the wall,” Maher recalls, sitting within view of the wood prints she’s been hanging for the opening of Vox Materia in the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.
“She was holding her mirror and comb, but her face was quite grotesque, almost like a Sheela-na-Gig.”
Re-reading Andersen’s Little Mermaid while pondering her curious discovery, Maher was struck by the allegorical nature of the tale.
“I got really interested in what the female has had to do throughout history in order to belong to the human race, or just to be an equal,” she says.
“It seemed to me that a lot of it was actually to give up her voice. And I’ve always been interested in the loss of voice.”
Mermaids, sphinxes, chimeras, medusa: myths of female hybrids are common.
They come from a past where the female body was othered, represented as mysterious and possibly dangerous, Maher believes.
In her work, she seeks to reclaim them.
And she’s done so for decades, approaching the female form with compassion and playful humour.
Mermaid-like motifs have appeared in her work before now.
There are no scaly tails or sea-shell bras to be seen in Vox Materia, though.
Taking the mermaid myth as a starting point, Maher used her own body to take her concept further: working from silhouettes of photos of herself contorted into different positions, she created the hand-painted wood relief prints that form a third of the exhibition.
The two other elements of the show are a video installation and a procession of small sculptures displayed in a long glass cabinet.
Maher launches animatedly into an explanation of the processes she used to produce this cabinet of curiosities.
She squeezed softened wax in her hands, dropped the resulting forms into icy water, and took them to a foundry to be moulded and cast in bronze before being patinated.
“I wanted to get fleshy colours, close to coral or bodily organs,” she says with visceral relish, gazing down at her creations.
“They have a lot of different references that people pick out themselves, but they have an internal body thing, as though your body has somehow extruded them.”
Material world
Maher’s endless curiosity about materials, so evident when she talks, has been a feature of her career in visual art.
Snail shells, nettles, hair, ice, bees: all have been used to create sculptures, two-dimensional works and installation pieces.
The third element in the exhibition is Cassandra’s Necklace, her 2012 short film based on a script by Anne Enright and featuring the actress Charlie Murphy, who would go on to star in Love/Hate.
It was produced for a retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, before her current cycle of work, yet again there’s the familiar theme of female agency and female voice.
Vox Materia represents a double home-coming for Maher, first exhibited in Thurles, close to where she grew up and now in the Crawford, in the very rooms in which she first learned to draw while in her 20s.
Once a part of the old art school, they are now exhibition rooms.
The 62-year-old gazes around, points out where high windows used to illuminate her evening classes; she’s happy to be back.
“Space and the history of a space is very important to me and I don’t ever see a space as neutral,” she says. “There’s always something left over.”
Repeal campaign
Having lived in Cork, Belfast and Dublin, Maher has lived and worked in Mayo for the past decade.
One of several prominent artists to have been involved in the Repeal The 8th campaign, she held banner-making workshops at her studio for protests in the lead up to the referendum and participated in the day of testimonies held in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, where artists, writers and performers read true stories of women who had abortions.
Perhaps more than any other referendum campaign in Irish history, artists’ voices were prominent in the lead-up to the abortion referendum.
“Artists are citizens and so it really concerned them as people and as productive women,” Maher says.
“But as an artist, you also stand back from society too. You see how it’s developing: that’s your job in a way.
"It wasn’t unusual for me to step into a campaign, but that campaign was just so relevant.”
Did she canvas? She smiles.
“I’m too vociferous to canvas,” she says. “You have to be very calm.”
From the same-sex marriage referendum to the abortion referendum to the recent underwhelming turn-out for the papal visit, there’s an unmistakeable societal shift away from the Catholic Church afoot in Ireland.
Maher doesn’t mince her words about her welcome for this shift.
“They enslaved, brutalised and sold Irish people,” she says.
Until they look at themselves and admit that, I won’t have much respect for them. People are thinking deeply about what has been found out about the collusion of church and state in the past 100 years.
“Real ordinary people have stood up and said no, this is wrong, this is not the way we want to be. That’s really welcome.”
Something to say
It’s a stance intrinsically linked to her feminism and her art, she says: “Since about 1990 I’ve been trying to position the female at the centre of the work as a thinking, autonomous figure, not just a model.
"Because that’s how most of us had experienced it through culture. That the female was just a figure to be projected onto.”
It’s the struggle for a female voice that Maher has grappled with throughout her career, and in this epoch of her life she says things are no different.
“Every facet of society is ageist as well as sexist,” she says.
Western society always privileges youth over maturity. But I think now’s the time to find your voice: your audibility instead of your visibility. What you have to say should be valued.
So has she well and truly found her voice, then?
She shrugs, smiles: “As an artist? The struggle goes on. I think it only ends when you stop breathing. You’re always trying to distil it.
“When you start out young it’s like, blech” — she mimes vomiting — “everything comes out: the kitchen sink. And then you refine it.”
