Pippa Little visits Alice Maher’s mid-career retrospective at IMMA which charts her focus on materials in metamorphoses
Intense moments of drama recur in ‘Becoming’, Alice Maher’s mid-career retrospective. The exhibition presents over two decades of Maher’s development where she has continually drawn from the cycle of life focused through the lens of female experience.
One of Maher’s strengths is to take an inconsequential material and by transforming it into a fragile object, bestow it with symbolic importance. In an interview with Brian McAvera in Irish Arts Review, Autumn 2008, she described a significant moment in her practice when ‘the history of materials came into focus for me’.
The realm of faith illustrated in the Book of Kells can be elusive to modern audiences; however, a new study by Bernard Meehan provides valuable insights into this peerless manuscript