For four decades, through drawing, sculpture, video and installation, Alice Maher has probed questions of identity, gender and embodiment in post-colonial Ireland. Her practice is concerned with the thresholds between myth and memory, object and image, the individual and the collective self. Maher belongs to a pioneering generation of Irish feminist practitioners; her commitments extend from the Women Artists Action Group in the 1980s to the Artists’ Campaign in support of the successful movement to repeal the effective ban on abortion, in 2018.
Maher explores myth, folklore and the subconscious, reconfiguring archetypes of femininity as unstable presences. In the outdoor installation Les Filles d’Ouranos (1996; remade for Biennale Arte 2026), multiple vermilion heads rise from water in a re-envisioning of Aphrodite’s birth. The goddess becomes a proliferation of voices merging fertility, fragmentation and warning. In The Sibyls (2025), Maher revisits the prophetic women of myth, who appear tangled amid vast coils of hair; beneath them, elements resembling great globs of mercury rest on dark mirrored surfaces. Here, large-scale drawing and sculpture engage in a tensile dialogue.
Refusing fixed interpretation in favour of slippage and transformation, Maher opens spaces where the boundaries between the personal and the political, the sacred and the profane, remain generative and unresolved.
—Sarah Kelleher
