Helmet, 2003
Lambda print
Edition of 4
610 x 610 mm
In this, Alice Maher's fourth solo exhibition with Green On Red Gallery, the artist continues her investigations into different media and materials through this imaginative new series of photographic work. Using Renaissance portraiture as a reference and herself as the subject, Maher has staged eleven singular and often startling tableaux. Found materials are used, not to make sculpture, but to extend, transform and transgress her own body. These self-portraits are no hymns to feminine beauty. They are images invested with a terrible and profound knowledge of the natural world. Yet many of the portraits express a wry humour at what is happening to the artist herself, a bemused player in the metamorphosis that occurs as the body coughs up its complex imaginings.
Each work is made as a transparency and an edition of four lambda prints per image were then created. The lambda print is made by digitally scanning the transparency. The resulting work is an extremely rich, colour-saturated print.
In addition to her Portrait series, Maher will also be exhibiting a highly unusual and provocative sculpture at the Father Matthew Hall on Church Street, Dublin 7 (behind The Four Courts). Entitled Mnemosyne after the goddess of memory, this sculpture is literally a bed made of ice. Birth, love and death take place in bed and it is of course the repository position of many of our imaginative wanderings and dreams. The shape of the work is an amalgam of bed/ couch/ chariot/ sarcophogus. This work will be on view Wednesday to Sunday, between 12 and 6p.m, opening on the 17th April and running until the 11th May.
The artist will give a Gallery Talk at Green On Red Gallery at 1:15 on Thursday, 8th May. All are welcome.
Maher recently won the Marten Toonder Award 2002 towards the realisation of Mnemosyne. Portraits will also be on view at Purdy Hicks Gallery in London in April while The Axe (and the waving girl), will be exhibited at the New Art Centre Sculpture Park, Roche Court, Salisbury.