Alice Maher: ‘You’re Not a Prisoner of History’

Aoife Murray • Ocula

Alice Maher’s strange and beautiful multimedia works have long sought out the marginal and the mythic—both in subject matter and materiality. Keep (1992) was formed of a towering sculpture made of hair collected from women living across Ireland, while Cassandra’s Necklace (2012) included a piece of jewellery modelled on animal tongues Maher had bought on a whim and stored in a freezer for years. The same preoccupation with myth and magic links the three distinct works that the Irish artist will show at Arsenale during the 61st Venice Biennale, as part of In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. Maher’s 1996 water-based installation, Les Filles d’Ouranos, has been specially reconstructed at the Gaggiandre, to appear alongside The Sibyls (2025), four monumental drawings and sculpture installations. The installation is completed by the large-scale textile piece, The Map (2021), made in collaboration with artist Rachel Fallon.

Time, or timeliness, plays an important part in much of Maher’s work. When will a tongue in the freezer begin again to speak? When will an ancient myth resurface in the present? “The now is the then—it’s the future as well,” she tells me. “There is no ‘now’ because, as we’re speaking, the next minute has come upon us.” Born in 1956 in County Tipperary, Maher studied in Cork before completing an MFA in Belfast during the 1980s, while the violence and unrest of the Troubles filled the city. During the 1990s, Maher and her milieu were energised by the “frisson” of change across the island of Ireland. The Catholic Church was losing its grip on the state; the art world was opening up to more experimental practice, particularly from women, and the popularity of what Maher describes as “macho” Neo-Expressionism was over. Perhaps in reaction to the seemingly disintegrating monuments of church, state and artistic institutions, Maher worked extensively with materials “that you’d find in the ditch outside,” such as nettles, berries and thorns. “They’re all crumbling and dying, like myself,” she explains. “Time is part of that work—it’s not trying to last forever, like marble or gold or bronze.” Public artworks in particular, Maher believes, should exist as ephemeral temporal interventions, as opposed to permanent memorials. “If it lives, it lives. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

 

For the Biennale, however, Maher has reassembled a work first presented in 1996 as a public commission. Les Filles d’Ouranos (The Daughters of Ouranos) takes its name from the Greco-Roman myth surrounding the birth of Aphrodite (or Venus), who emerged from the seafoam of her father’s severed genitals. Fifteen orange heads, their eyes just breaking the water’s surface, are moored on anchors, like buoys. This is a “squadron” of women in the process of emerging—or, perhaps, they are simply choosing not to emerge. What will audiences make of it, 30 years since its inception? “Who knows what they got from it [then], anyway?” Maher says. “The best thing I overheard when it was shown in France was from a little girl with her mummy. She said: ‘Maman, les sirens—if the mermaids stood up, would the lake go down?’”

Mythic women of monumental proportion are also the subject of Maher’s drawings in Arsenale, The Sibyls, which depict four seers engulfed in their own hair. “They are figures struggling with the weight of their heads, struggling with their bodies,” Maher says. At the base of each drawing lies a dark mirror, scattered with silvery nickel-plated, bronze “gobs”. The mirrors and the shapes on their surfaces recall the divinatory practice of scrying, where the querent gazes into the mirrored pool to see what message comes back. In this instance, the message remains incomprehensible.

The Map, a giant textile work, must be approached from behind. It’s felt before it’s seen. “You see it with the light shining through,” says Maher, “so it looks like it might be the psyche of the map, its inner world.” Maher, a founding member of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, first worked with Fallon during the successful 2018 campaign that repealed the amendment to the Constitution of Ireland, which had effectively banned abortion in Ireland since 1983. Working together again on The Map, Maher and Fallon used cartography as a way to begin addressing the sprawling legacy of Mary Magdalene, the “contested female figure who has been handed down to us as a penitent sinner and a whore, and a brilliant foil in a male-dominated Catholic Church for their Virgin Mother”. It was Magdalene’s name that the Church used for its notoriously harsh and punitive “laundries”, in which unmarried mothers, and others considered to have transgressed social respectability, were incarcerated.

The Map was created slowly and incrementally throughout the early Covid-19 lockdowns, becoming an alternative Mappa Mundi that deals with, as Maher describes it, “the psychic wound that this country had experienced in its treatment of women and children”. It is estimated that tens of thousands of “fallen” young women—a condition applied loosely and liberally to all manner of girls—were committed to the laundries between the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the closure of the last laundry in 1996. Maher and Fallon completed the map with the Imaginal Forest, inspired by the natural phenomenon of metamorphic insects who “have already in their body the imaginal disks of the next stage of their metamorphosis”. For the artists, this expressed the “idea that you can transcend pain and history. You’re not a prisoner of history.”

Despite dealing with intergenerational trauma and national shame, there’s humour in the work too. Maher’s favourite place on the map is called Slag Island, and the artists put a pub there, The Hound and Harlot. It’s perhaps this element of humour that allows the works to translate to an international audience, a tempering edge that grounds the work in the human scale even as it reaches to the mythic and monumental. It is also, perhaps, another instance of Maher’s negotiation of the sacred and the profane. Mary Magdalene, the sex worker who washed Christ’s body; Cassandra, who could speak the truth but wasn’t believed; Aphrodite, born from genitals; all are figures who bridge the basest of human nature as well as the divine. It’s in that open space, Maher’s work proposes, that myth is dislodged from its certainty and becomes alive again. —[O]

May 5, 2026