Limb

Alice Maher was educated at the University of Limerick and Crawford College of Art Cork. She was awarded a Masters degree in Fine Art from the University of Ulster and shortly after a Fulbright Scholarship to San Francisco Art Institute. Her work involves many different media including painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography and installation. She has exhibited widely in Ireland, England and the United States, and represented Ireland in the 22nd São Paolo Bienal. ‘Limb’ of one from a series of 12 portraits. In her series of 12 portraits from 2003 Maher presents – or hides – herself amidst berries, sticks, tongues, moss, hearts and snail shells.  She uses such materials to disguise and shield her physiognomy, to suggest unsettling metamorphoses, rich in possible associations with the post-colonial sphere of rural Ireland.  Using Ressaisance profiles, symmetrical frontal views and flat single-colour backgrounds, all devices which can monumentalise or schematise a portrait image, she stages the female self as natural artifice. Text by Gill Perry : ‘Alice Maher: Natural Artifice’ Brighton & Hove Museum  2007