VISUAL ART:Alice Maher's sensuous 'film-drawings' are inspired by mythical and magical archetypes but have a compelling logic of their own, writes AIDAN DUNNE
THE BULK of Alice Maher's work in her Green on Red exhibition, The Music of Things, falls somewhere between drawings and film. So her own term, "film-drawings", is a pretty good description, and not just a way of side-stepping the word animation, because she hasn't produced film animation in the usual sense of the term. There is fantastical imagery and magical transformations throughout all four of her film – drawings, but she's not interested in creating the illusion of movement, and each transformed image is essentially static until it fades to the next.
Static, but the sequences are also hypnotic, as we wait to see what’s coming next. Maher may well have felt the same way herself when she was making the work. She started with a blank sheet of drawing paper on which she made an image, and then progressively amended and changed it, scanning the results at ten-minute intervals and hence building up a residue of erased layers. The methodology, including the rich graphic texture engendered by the accumulated history of each evolving image recalls the animated charcoal drawings of the South African artist William Kentridge.
What we see here is inevitably derived from an imaginative terrain familiar to those who’ve encountered some of Maher’s previous work, but it doesn’t feel calculated at all and it doesn’t follow a conventional narrative arc. Rather there’s an air of free association about it, and a delving into the unconscious. What happens next is unexpected but appears to have its own compelling logic, to make sense on some deep imaginative level.
The title recalls that of Paul Auster's novel, The Music of Chanceand, as with Auster, there's an abstracted, allegorical quality to Maher's world. A series of drawings she made around 1990 or so, The Thicket, was a relevant precursor to her film-drawings. Those earlier images featured a young girl, a perhaps autobiographical Alice-in-Wonderland figure who in a variety of contexts seems to relish attaining a sense of her own strength and potential out in the world.
Maher looked and looks to mythical and magical archetypes as a means of visualising and dramatising ordinary, individual experience.
That is, she refers to myths, to fairytales and to medieval history (with particular regard to the Norman legacy in Ireland). It's not that she just uses them as references, though, more that she takes all of this material, and perhaps psychoanalytical readings of the material, as constituting a major part of her own personal visual language and line of approach. The immediate precedent of The Music of Thingswas a set of drawings that made up part of a major show at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2007 – a show that, it's worth mentioning, should really have featured in the list of the significant solo shows of the last decade published in this newspaper recently.
It was called The Night Garden, and included a group of large- scale charcoal drawings, Bestiary, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's celebrated painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Maher devised a number of strange, multiply hybridised "creatures", mingling elements of the human with aspects of animals, birds, plants and fruit, all brilliantly rendered in richly patterned silhouette. There were also more delicate pencil drawings, published with accompanying verses by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and it is these that served as the specific starting point for The Music of Things.
Ovid's Metamorphoses, that endless fund of inspiration for artists, writers and poets, comes to mind as human, plant and animal merge and mutate in Maher's drawings. Nothing is fixed, including species and gender. Yet a consistency does emerge. As with The Thicket, one gets the feeling that Maher is particularly looking to individual, feminine experience, symbolically enacted in an inner, fantasy world. The term fantasy is not meant to imply mere imaginative indulgence, that is to say, but a bid to articulate and describe what otherwise eludes expression.
Maher draws beautifully, with a precise, sensuous line. It’s intriguing that what is projected onto the wall or viewed onscreen is the work: it’s not a photographic record of a series of drawings because the drawings were brought temporarily into being and no longer exist. Mind you, the show does include a more physically concrete set of images in the form of a suite of seven intaglio prints (designed and printed by Stoney Road Press in an edition of just 25). They are recognisably central to the film-drawings and several display Maher’s tremendous knack for coming up with an image that has a quality of inevitable rightness about it.
It’s presumably no coincidence that 1001 drawings overall went into the completion of the film-drawings, recalling Scheherazade’s ingenious means of avoiding her own execution by keeping the king interested in what happens next in the stories she invents. Walter Benjamin observed, with her in mind, that story-telling is a way of postponing the future. Scheherazade as a proto-feminist heroine is an altogether appropriate presence in Maher’s work, and if you take the trouble to visit the Green on Red you’ll certainly enjoy postponing your future for 20 minutes or so.
The Music of Things, four "film-drawings" by Alice Maher, with soundscape by Trevor Knight, plus other works. Green on Red Gallery, Lombard St East, Dublin Until Jan 16
