From her studio near Ireland’s west coast, Alice Maher has, for over four decades, developed a practice that moves between nature and subversion, transformation and mythology, working across sculpture, drawing, installation, and textile.
She has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, including representing Ireland at the 22nd São Paulo Bienal in 1994. She is now one of three Irish artists invited by the late Koyo Kouoh to participate in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys.
Talking to Elephant, Maher reflects on Kouoh’s studio visit back in 2016, the three bodies of work on view in Venice, and the question of whether the Biennale can ever be a politically neutral space.
You first met curator Koyo Kouoh several years ago. How did that relationship come about?
When Koyo came to Ireland in 2016 to curate EVA International, Ireland’s biennial, she asked if she could visit my studio, which is quite unusual as I live in the middle of nowhere in Mayo on the west coast. She came by train, had dinner with us, went through the cupboards and bookshelves, looked through my art, and stayed the night in the studio. It really was emblematic of her approach to curatorship. It’s not just “Let’s pick a work.” She wants to know about your life.
I then drove her back to Limerick. We live very near what’s called the Gaeltacht, a district in Ireland where people actually still speak Irish. She was very interested in that, and she understood that to take away the language is a classic colonial tool used to diminish a culture. Later on I learned that she requested that the entire EVA International catalogue be translated into Irish. That was the kind of person she was.
And so, how did the Biennale invitation come about?
Koyo had already passed away by the time the Biennale came together, but the curators carrying forward her vision came to visit the studio. I had just finished a large body of drawings and sculptures titled The Sibyls (2025), which they were interested in. While we were looking through other works, they came across a collaborative textile piece I had made with Rachel Fallon, The Map, and asked to include that as well.
Then, as they were leaving, they noticed these orange sculptural heads I had in the garden. They were completely decommissioned, with weeds growing out of their nostrils, but they asked if I would consider remaking them for the exhibition.
Yes, can you tell me about these heads?
They’re called Les Filles d’Ouranos, and I made them in 1996 when I was living in Paris on a residency, for a temporary outdoor installation in a public park.
Mythological figures play a big part in what I’m interested in and how I work as an artist. In the story of the Birth of Venus, Uranus has his genitals cut off and thrown into the ocean, and from that is born this ideal of female beauty that was passed down through the Renaissance by painters like Botticelli. I was thinking about multiplicity and the idea that there isn’t just one version of beauty, just as there isn’t one fixed version of a myth. So I made a group of identical, bright orange heads. In the water they read almost like buoys, which also plays on “boys”, so the fact that they are female heads becomes a wry comment on identity. When they were installed in Paris, I would go to the park and listen to people’s responses. Children often referred to them as les sirènes, the mermaids.
How will they be displayed in Venice?
When the curators spotted them in my garden, they immediately saw their potential and asked if I would remake them. I had to fundraise to do that, so I applied to the Irish Arts Council, who supported it. They saw the value in bringing something back after 30 years and in the renewal of ideas and reinvigoration of the concept, so I was very lucky.
There will be 12 bobbing in the water in the Arsenale, scattered so that sometimes you see the back of a head, sometimes the front, with just their noses above the surface.
And so after sitting with them, we move on to the Arsenale to see The Map(2021), a monumental textile work you collaborated on with fellow Irish artist Rachel Fallon.
I love working intergenerationally. Rachel is fifteen years younger than me, and that energy of sharing feels like a much better space to be in as I get older. I am seventy this year. You do not know how you get there, but you do. It is easy to settle into what you do, but working with others opens things up. I also think today you have to work with other people to sustain art.
How did the two of you come together for the project?
We met through an activist campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which forbade abortion in Ireland. We made banners and visual materials as part of the movement. It showed me the power of the visual in public space, and its ability to make people think beyond simple binaries.
And how did that lead to The Map?
We were originally commissioned by Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre for The Magdalene Series, a programme of exhibitions, performances and events curated by Maolíosa Boyle, responding to the legacy of Mary Magdalene. In Ireland, the image of the penitent woman was used to control and institutionalise women, particularly in the Magdalene Laundries, institutions run by Roman Catholic orders where women were confined, worked without pay, and often had their children taken from them. Using the iconography of Renaissance maps, we reimagine Magdalene’s story to subvert the power structures these maps uphold.
We took constellations such as “The Great Bear”, “The Little Bear” and ”Orion’s Belt, and renamed them after ordinary women and children. The islands and continents carry the different labels imposed on Magdalene. There’s an island called Slag Island, where figures like Jezebel appear, streets named after witches, and sea monsters such as ignorance and poverty.
And it’s all hand-stitched?
Yes, by both of us. We made it during lockdown, working separately at home on the east and west coasts. When we could meet, we would get together in Dublin, lay everything out, and decide what to work on next. That process allowed it to build slowly, layer by layer, with humour and complexity.
What’s wonderful about the way it’s installed is that it’s never flat. It’s a sculptural work, so the viewer has to move around it. The reverse is almost as important, with crochet elements hanging down to the floor like guts.
Then we’ve got your recent drawings and sculptures nearby?
Yes, well the sculptures came first. I made them by squeezing wax in my hands and then casting them in bronze and chrome. That squeezing action feels almost primal, a pre-language expression. I think of them as a kind of language trying to emerge, and it made me think about our own experience of language in Ireland. Irish was suppressed, but it survives in how we speak English, how we write, how we sing. Nothing is fully erased. It just reappears in mutated forms. The sculptures sit on dark mirrors, the kind a seer would look into to tell the future, reflecting the sculptures into another world.
As for the drawings, there are four, all very large, showing female figures wrestling with their hair. It’s unclear whether it is growing on them or devouring them. When I was working on these, I was thinking about the Sibyl, a female figure from the classical world, which in Greek means “prophetess”; a woman believed to foresee the future, someone people would turn to in times of distress. That feels close to the moment we are living in now. It’s a time of uncertainty, of disruption, and fear, and is why I kept returning to her.
How does that sense of uncertainty you describe connect to what’s happening around the Biennale right now?
74 of the participating artists have put out a statement about the relocation of the Israeli pavilion in the Arsenale. We note that its inclusion alongside the main exhibition goes against Koyo’s curatorial vision, which sought to refuse the spectacle of horror, and tune into where “the dignity of all living beings are safeguarded.” At the same time, the issue points to a broader contradiction within the Biennale itself, in how nations are included or excluded. There was precedent for blocking countries in previous years: Russia was excluded in 2022 and 2024, and in 1974 all national pavilions were closed in solidarity with the people of Chile. The idea that the Biennale is not political is incorrect. Italy doesn’t recognise Palestine as a country, which is how they can exclude them. We have Palestinian artists in the group exhibition where there is a genuine effort to reflect a multiplicity of voices from across the world, but the Biennale cannot be seen as a neutral zone.
