Silhouettes and patterns are at the heart of Alice Maher's latest Dublin exhibition. She tells Aidan Dunnewhat inspires her.
Standing in the RHA Gallagher Gallery before the opening of her exhibition, The Night Garden, a distinctly grimy Alice Maher observes that she is looking forward to being clean again. It is a warm day, and her clothes and skin are caked with a film of charcoal dust that combines well with sweat to produce a smoky pigment.
She and several other helpful artists have been applying masses of charcoal to the huge end wall of the gallery (and inevitably to themselves and the general surroundings), making a monumental wall-drawing that forms a dramatic centrepiece to her show. "It's a filthy occupation," she says.
For months prior to this, she has been living in a charcoal cloud, because everything on display in the Gallagher is a drawing of one sort or another, and most are made with charcoal, so her studio, close to Westport in Co Mayo, has been filled with the stuff for the past six months.
"When Patrick [RHA director Patrick Murphy] first came to me last year and suggested a show, I think he sort of had in mind the 10-year survey show of my work that was already in train for Brighton and Hove Museums," Maher says. "But I thought, well, there was a logic to doing that show in England, where people wouldn't be familiar with what I do, but why not make a whole new body of work for Dublin? It's not every day you get offered a space the size of the Gallagher."
What she has created is a phantasmagoric, unsettling environment in black and white, composed of the huge set-piece on the gallery's end wall, a group of closely related large-scale framed drawings, a frieze bordering the ceiling that emphasises the height of the space and, by contrast, a long, lectern-like shelf that allows us to peruse a series of small, dreamlike drawings in which human figures are subject to a series of bizarre transformations. One inspiration for the work was Ovid's Metamorphosis, "in which people undergo all sorts of transformations, into plants and even stones. I wanted that kind of elasticity, where you're never sure what's coming next."
The main source of inspiration, though, was Hieronymus Bosch's painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. This celebrated fantasy, painted in the early years of the 16th century, has fascinated and perplexed observers ever since. Across three crowded panels, masses of human and animal figures engage in bizarre games and rituals, in landscapes occupied by objects and artifacts of unsurpassed oddness. In general terms, one can discern a progression, from left to right, detailing a cataclysmic collapse engendered by sinfulness. An Edenic beginning is poisoned by human lapses, and the sybaritic excess represented in the central panel degenerates into the hellish torments of the third.
Maher took the lens-shaped outline of her wall-drawing from the pool at the centre of Bosch's composition. "I don't know if people will make that connection, but I think they'll recognise it subliminally, if not consciously," she says.
She went on to derive her wildly hybridised "bestiary" from some of the numerous examples in Bosch, intermingling elements of humans, animals, plants and fruit (ripe fruit being emblematic of the temptations of the flesh). There are other sources too, she notes, such as "Pompeian frescoes and 18th-century wallpaper" and contemporary decorative motifs.
Everything is depicted in negative silhouette, thick masses of charcoal outlining ghostly forms which are then further inhabited by positive silhouettes within, generating a sense of eerie, teeming activity. We can never quite pin down any one stable, coherent image. Prior to the invention of the camera, silhouettes were chiefly a relatively cheap form of portraiture. They have been revived by artists such as Kara Walker who, like Maher, undermines the staid conventions of portraiture to make something unsettling, creating a sense of mystery and uncertainty.
Maher likes the way nothing quite stays in place. Even the repeat patterns, the decorative elements of her designs, she notes, are made fallibly by hand and are hence a bit unruly, never quite fitting into their allotted role. The charcoal, thickly applied, seeps down the walls and paper, overstepping its notional boundaries. There's a feeling of unstoppable organic growth and development, as though the cavernous gallery space has indeed become a kind of night garden, a dream space in which magical and sometimes disturbing transformations, enacted in the drawings so titled, can flourish. These small drawings have a storybook quality, recalling the way even the most startling events in fairytales can be seen to relate to everyday inner life.
There is just one expressly sculptural feature, a female head and torso that bursts through the marble wall of the main staircase, an iconoclastic gesture that is appropriate in several respects. As it happens, The Night Garden is the final exhibition to be held in the RHA Gallagher Gallery as it presently is.
After the show, the academy will close for a year for an extensive programme of remodelling and development. The grand staircase will disappear entirely.
Maher's bronze figure is a reworking of a piece by the key sculptor of the Irish cultural revival, and the creator of several key nationalist monuments, including The Death of Cuchulainn.
"There are so few Irish figurative sculptors," Maher says. "And Oliver Sheppard was a very good one." Her figure is taken from a piece of his in the Limerick City Gallery of Art. "It's an odd piece because no one is quite sure what she's doing." The oddly anglicised title, Finn Foya, is translated as "sweet voiced", and it consists of a nude girl carrying a cow bell and apparently listening to something.
Maher likes the fact that Sheppard was an academician and was in fact the RHA professor of sculpture for nearly 40 years. She sees her placement of Finn Foya as a symbol of renewal.
"It's funny," she says. "When I said I was doing an exhibition here, a couple of people said it was a difficult space. I never though of it as difficult, just big. And from the beginning I was determined that I wasn't going to divide it up. I didn't want to break up the space, and I didn't want to do a retrospective, because that seemed to me to suggest that you're somehow of a past generation. My view is that we should blast forward while we have the energy."
The Night Garden: Alice Maher, accompanied by a two-part publication in collaboration with Éilis Ní Dhuibhne and designed by Language, is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until Oct 28.
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