C106
review
Portadown: Alice Maher at Millenium Court Arts Centre
The masquerade,
in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness
is a mask which can be worn or removed.
At first
glance the exhibition Portraits by the Dublin
based artist Alice Maher of twelve Lambda prints and a
large charcoal drawing on paper are immediately striking.
The self-portrait prints are extremely rich colour-saturated
images that stand apart from the slight intricacies of
the large drawing. On initial reading a connection between
the portraits is sustained through the juxtaposed of inanimate
objects. Within the broader breath of Maher's practice
the recurring fascination with 'display and clothing'
is evidently continued - inanimate objects in the portraits
are either worn by or displayed on the artist. Andromeda
- a charcoal drawing of braided hair - is charged with
significance. The use of hair presentation as/with decoration
explores notions of beauty, and its part in the construction
of femaleness, recalling the important Ombres
show of 1998.
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Alice
Maher: Limb, 2003, Lambda print, 61 x 61
cm; courtesy the artist
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In necklace
and collar inanimate objects of the tongues and
hearts of lambs are strung around the artist's neck. Necklaces,
chokers and lockets are often gifts given to women to
display as tokens of love, symbolising both the cement
of a social relationship and the obligations it incurs.
The work is evocative of classical portraiture and the
display of such tokens as decorative, also indicate social
position, class, and affluence. For Maher the actually
wearing of the meat hearts makes "visceral something that
is usually only imagined or miniaturised, kept locked
up. You are turning the body inside out, opening the forbidden
chamber.... A choker of real hearts exposes the material
truth of the idea."
In the remaining
portraits the images continue to draw from Maher's interest
in display and clothing. The artists use of inanimate
objects some of which are organic forms, are either positioned
on or appear to be entering the upper body, or present
the artists face either obscured or shrouded. Maher in
the presentation of multiple portraits defies the singular
and iconographic status of classical self-portraiture,
therefore denying the production of a singular identity.
By not mediating within selfhood and the language of traditional
portraiture Maher conceives something not to be defined.
Cultural
construction though image, song, and text has feminised
Ireland as a land to be owned and protected, the home
and reproducer of a national identity. This work draws
on the position of 'woman' as 'closer to nature', both
psychologically and bodily as reproducers of life and
the nation. For Maher, by 'miming the mime' and reflecting
back the images and associations posed in such social
constructs, is destabilising the paradigm.
Traditional
masculine iconography has rendered self-portraiture as
questionable in terms of the validity of notions of the
artist as a romantic creative genius which is of central
concern here. Deconstructing a predetermined identity
as 'woman' and 'Irish', constructed in and through representation
in visual culture is also significant. Maher is overt
in these portraits that the enacted position of identification
of self/woman/Irish/other is a position of empowerment.
But for Maher the process is neither essentialist nor
personal. With the assumption of multiple identities,
an enactment or 'performance of the primitive',6
Maher queries the notion of a single knowable gender and
identity negotiating new and extraordinary spaces.
Chérie
Driver is a researcher and artist living in Belfast.
Alice
Maher: Portraits, Millennium Court Arts
Centre, Portadown, September 2003
