Skewed Visions: An Interview with Alice Maher

By Brian Curtin

I have followed Alice Maher’s career ever since I was her student in Ireland during the later 80s, the time she began to attract significant attention as an artist. Her early works –large expressive, baroque, drawings where figures and the spaces they occupy appear subject to some urgent but temporary force of transformation– made a permanent impression on my psyche. I believed an interview with the artist might help explicate both my early and on-going fascination with her output. However, given the nature of fascination and the power of Maher’s art, I found formulating questions for this interview difficult. So much so I contacted a friend in Ireland, the writer Gerard Staunton, who is very familiar with Maher’s work. He explained my difficulty: There is a rare sense of jouissance, something specifically and convincingly fetishistic about Maher’s work that appears to become dulled and blunted by any kind of earnest contextualization.

Alice Maher, Dark Lake, 2007, Charcoal on Wall, 17 x 6.5 m. Courtesy of the artist.

Your 2008 show at the David Nolan Gallery in Manhattan is titled Hypnerotomachia. Please tell me about this show.

I am showing 23 small pencil drawings called The Night Garden, six large charcoal drawings and five etchings on eggs (ostrich eggs!). Everything is quite densely worked; even my pencil drawings have hundreds and thousands of ghost markings. I have been studying and looking at Hieronymus Bosch for a year now and am influenced by the excessiveness of mood and hyper-fecundation that emanates from his Garden of Earthly Delights.

The title comes from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a weird, erotic, allegorical tale by Francesco Colonna that was first printed in Venice in 1499. A friend sent it to me saying it reminded her of the excessive detail in my new works. I love the book and the strange and forgotten words. ‘Hypnerotomachia’ is often translated as ‘The Strife of Love in a Dream’ but, like all translations, this is undoubtedly a lie!

The lie appeals to you?

I love lies and half-truths because the unadulterated truth is horribly boring.

Alice Maher, Beautiful Mouth, 2006, cast bronze, 30 X 51 X 38 cm. In background ‘Myriapod’ 2007, charcoal on paper, 152.5 X 204 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Yes, myth and legend very much informs your work.

They say that myths teach us how to relate to the Gods and fairy tales tell us how to relate to each other. But I am interested in the fact that fairytales are primarily handed down as oral rather than written accounts, making them a great vehicle for metamorphosis and flux. Stories grow and obtain legs depending on who is telling them.

This explains the great leaps of scale in your drawings and installations?

Yes. Scale is an ever moving feast in fairy tales, where giant beanstalks and thumb-sized children live amongst the regular population. I am not interested in the medium-size scale of things and I believe this stems from an interest in hyper-states, as in dreams or times of illness or states of physical change like adolescence. I have always been influenced by the non-mainstream; in art history, the Italian Renaissance with all its enlightenment did not excite me as much as medieval times where you find skewed perspective and disproportionate scale. I think this is why Bosch has preoccupied me lately. There have been hundreds of books and theses written on his Earthly Delight images and yet nobody can truly explain what is going on. His ‘garden’ is a fully functioning integrated world where humans, fruits and birds exist in a wholly believable topsy-turvy scale and this often is the same in the world of the fairy or wonder-tale.

Now you will say that the fairy-tale is the classic feminine site of the margin.

Well, feminist theory has informed some representations of your work.

I am not as concerned with feminist theory as feminist theory is concerned with me. I am a feminist, of course, and have been very aware of Irish women’s struggle for equality, especially in the 70’s, when the church still ruled both public and private lives here with an iron fist. But I am very clear that I do not work to anyone’s agenda but my own.

Your recent work includes what the critic Jennie Guy referred to as ‘overtly decorative influences’.

The devil is in the detail! You will find decoration clinging to the edges of buildings and around the margins of books, everywhere it can insinuate itself. Decoration is a kind of creeping weed. But while there are patterns in my drawings it is not repetitive: they are all hand drawn and subtly show off their ‘mistakes’.

The language of your artworks has changed so much since the early drawings.

In the late eighties expressive forms were current and I would have fallen under this influence. As time went on I began to develop a personal visual vocabulary and sought out new forms that could embody this.

Brian Curtin is an art critic and occasional curator based in Bangkok.