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PhD candidate Sarah Kelleher co-curates Alice Maher exhibition
Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner, current and former PhD candidates in History of Art, launched Vox Materia by Alice Maher at the Crawford Gallery, Cork on 6 September 2018. The show was previously installed at the Source Arts Centre, Thurles, from 30 March to 5 May 2018.
Vox Materia comprises a multi-part installation of sculpture and works on paper. Stemming from Maher’s consideration of a 12th Century mermaid carving at nearby Kilcooley Abbey, this show meditates on voice and silence.
The mermaid is a hybrid creature that transgresses boundaries between human and animal, and is often associated with traumatic loss of voice. Maher deploys the mermaid not as a motif, but as an ambiguous and powerful conceptual tool to explore ideas of language, embodiment, agency, and autonomy. The artist begins by adopting and documenting contorted postures; creating strained silhouettes that gesture towards a language of the body in extremis.
Vox Materia exploits the tactile, contingent qualities of wood relief print and watercolour to articulate amoebic, inter-elementary forms while a series of hand-held sculptural forms created new material and corporeal vocabularies.
The exhibition at the Source Arts Centre ran from 30 March to 5 May 2018. It will run at the Crawford Gallery from 7 September – 24 November 2018.
Please scroll down for photographs of the exhibition
More information at the following links:
https://pluckprojects.
Vox Materia: Opening night at the Crawford Gallery, Cork.
Vox Materia: Alice Maher, photograph by Michael McSweeney
Vox Materia: View of the installation at the Source Art Centre, Thurles.
Vox Materia: View of the installation at the Source Art Centre, Thurles.