Ms Alice Maher

Alice Maher is one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary artists, producing iconic art works which contribute greatly to national and international cultural narratives. Alice spent a typical rural childhood in county Tipperary, to where many of the themes and concerns of her artistic life can be traced. Her father, Larry, was a cattle dealer and merrymaker, her mother Kitty, had a deep sense of the aesthetic, and their house was always filled with ideas, stories and folklore running alongside the hard labour of survival on a small farm. Alice was one of the first group of students to take European Studies at UL in 1974, where she was exposed to European culture, philosophy and languages as her own country began to experience the convulsions of profound societal change. She graduated from what was then-NIHE Limerick with a BA in European Studies in 1978. 

Alice began her formal art studies in 1985 at the Crawford College of Art in Cork, went on to receive an MFA from University of Ulster in 1986, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute the following year. This began a life long association with the United States where she regularly exhibits and is represented by New York gallery, David Nolan. Her drawings are included in the collections of Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Hammond Museum Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York. Alice’s work touches on a wide range of subjects often reprising or challenging mythic and vernacular narratives. She has used found materials such as nettles, snails and thorns to make her iconic sculptural objects, imbuing each with its own mnemonic power. During the nineties, her interest in space led to her pioneering the use of Installation Art, that is to say where the atmosphere, the light, the sound, and not solely the art objects, allow the viewer to have an all-immersive art experience. 

In 1994, Alice represented Ireland at the Sao Paolo Biennale, in the same year she opened her first major solo show 'Familiar', in Ireland at the Douglas Hyde gallery in Dublin, bursting fully formed onto both international and national stages simultaneously. In 1996, she worked in France for a time under the auspices of 'L'Imaginaire Irlandais' an international celebration of Irish culture initiated by presidents Mary Robinson and Francois Mitterand and she continues her connection to France with exhibitions in Paris, Rouen, Poitiers and Melle. Her own poetic imagination is represented in the drawing collection of the Georges Pompidou Centre Paris. Alice’s works at that time challenged the construction of identity and she has ever since sought to bring visibility to the female, both as subject and originator of art. She was elected to Aosdana in 1996. 

Her career went from strength to strength following this early success as her work continued to metamorphose and embrace new materials and methods, including photography and print, and in latter years, video animation and film. Alice has also worked in other spheres, with photographers, performers, composers, theatre and lighting designers, engineers and architects and considers this kind of collaboration as key to the expansion of her artistic language. 

Her solo exhibitions include the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, The Galway Arts Centre, Orchard Gallery Derry, Limerick City Gallery of Art, the Project Arts Centre Dublin, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery at UCC and the RHA Dublin. A survey show of Alice’s work 'Natural Artifice', was presented at Brighton and Hove Museum in 2005, gaining her further recognition in the UK, where she is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery London. In 2012, the Irish Museum of Modern Art dedicated a retrospective exhibition to her 30 year practice so far. 'Becoming: Alice Maher' extended over 15 rooms of installations and films, and was one of the most visited shows of the museums history as it mapped the vast range of this artists cultural contribution. 

In 2012, Alice was presented with an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by the National University of Ireland. She continues to work and live in Ireland and will exhibit her film 'Cassandra's Necklace' at EVA International in Limerick in 2016.