Alice Maher: The Glorious Maid of the Charnel House

In Alice Maher's new watercolour series, The Glorious Maid of the Charnel House, internal and external worlds interface, co-exist and self generate. Maher's reference points include art history, mythic narrative and medical textbooks, as her shape shifting maids call down and mischievously intervene with the often problematic history of visual representation of the feminine throughout all of these fields. The inner and the outer body unfolds and enfolds simultaneously and human, animal and vegetal intermingle and overlap in intense hybrid forms.

'Distilling and braiding a representational web between Hieronymus Bosch and Leonora Carrington's fantastical subject-object-animal-vegetal transfigurations, Maher's mutating maids are excessively, incongruently and defiantly within processes of becoming and change'. (Tina Kinsella 'this is the fluid in which we meet each other: on Alice Maher's recent drawings' 2016)

These enigmatic maids push, pull, carry, sprout, seep, multiply, extrude, propagate and gratify themselves, all the while retaining an ethereal calm; serene inhabitants of this Irish artist's ever generative imagination.