Breathing it all in

Morris, Catherine (2012) Breathing it all in. In: Alice Maher; Becoming. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. ISBN 9781907020926

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Abstract

The concept of true freedom… is an ecstatic embrace of the future and of possibility. It is in the mind that real freedom is born and that is where it lives. The imagination must first grasp the ideal and it is with our imaginations that we win battles. The imagination—unbound, undefeated, timeless, endless, but most of all—hopeful.”

—Alice Maher speaking at the National Library of Ireland 8 March 20111

At Dublin airport she looks out at us. Meets our anxious gaze head on as we rush past transporting our little worlds in backpacks and suitcases, preparing to reveal our own faces to the Irish State. ‘Face of Ireland’. Clean of moss and clear of clinging otherness. No snails feeding off her image; no butchered hearts or silenced tongues bleeding onto her naked body. No dancing woman in a sculptured desert of Butoh carnival.

Alice Maher makes work that unmakes itself; that lives and dies in time. Nettles, berries, brambles and thickets all locked into a temporal shape shifting; sculptural changelings beneath which stings of grief are hidden. “I follow the work itself when it wants to go somewhere… I asked myself what would happen if you could see the under drawing?” The girl in ‘The Thicket’ watches all come alive in her rebellious and free imagination. “I wished I had recorded the stages of making.” In ‘The Music of Things’ a woman disappears into sound only to emerge as a something else or a someone other. It is in Maher’s work that we encounter the wilding—that space between pattern and ornament “where nature gets in.”

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Catherine Morris
Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2023 13:43
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2024 12:32
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3887

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