Dates: 25th February 2023 – 8th April 2023

Gallery: Great Patrick Street

VOX HYBRIDA was an exhibition by Irish artist Alice Maher, featuring responsive artworks from Emma Brennan and Chloe Austin. The exhibition was an exciting opportunity to witness Maher’s influence on a new generation of emerging artists, and their approach to the themes and ideas which evolved through conversation and collaboration between the three artists.

Spilling: Gesture, Tension, Voice

Anna Liesching

Gesture is at the core of our communication with others. When asked to consider our first use of language, most would think of our first word, though there is communication before this. We connect through gesture: touching, grabbing, squeezing. That gesture, or pre-language, connects the three artists in this show. They are grappling with capturing actions of communication in a physical object. Each artist has followed a process of gestures, translating their practice through stages to create the tangible object.

Vox Materia are visual representations of the pre-language gesture. Created by Alice Maher by squeezing wax as tight as she could, casting it in bronze and patenting it into this visceral, inky, fleshy, organ-like form. They appear to be excretions of human flesh; pieces of bodies.  The work has gone through a series of stages, one gesture bleeding into the next.  Reflecting a line of text, they are a hand-held version of voice. Language made material.

Chloe Austin and Emma Brennan have returned to the genesis of Maher’s work in their responses, creating their own gestural movements, capturing and translating this pre-language through their own bodies. Both Brennan and Austin have used drawing as their gestural mechanisms to translate Maher’s work and merge their own unique and sensitive practices. There is a fluidity to this process akin to hydrofeminism; that we are connected through our liquid makeup to all elements of nature and to each other, and that we are cyclical.

A central link between these three artists is the gestural act of drawing as a process to reach the finished work. Each has moved between the three dimensional to the flat surface and returned. Maher’s Vox Hybrida are photographs of her physical form, translated into silhouetted templates onto the flat surface of the wood block. They depict constant gestures in order to communicate the presence of a woman’s body.

The sculptures are translations of Maher’s hand movements. In preparation for her responsive work Austin drew Maher’s individual Vox Materia sculptures in order to reverse their translation and return to their original gesture: drawing. This long looking at the sculptures, drawing each individually and repeatedly, enabled her to generate words associated with the gestures that made them. In An Attached Screaming these words form the text that has been physically gouged out on the wall of the gallery. The voids holding the ink, which all three artists translated through a print process onto the other wall, to create the mirror of the text: all three enacting a psychical gesture together.

The drawings of the sculptures connected Austin to the physical gestures that Maher made when creating them. Her film Bones and Dust re-enacts these movements, taking us back to the pre-language of Vox Materia. As the viewer we become witness to the original gesture. We can even hear the movement.

Austin’s practice is concerned with queering and troubling language into a different form of expression. Her use of water visually triggers thoughts on hydrofeminism. Water flows through everything, including the soil of the film. This cyclicality also connects to the title of the work Bones and Dust and permeates throughout this exhibition. These natural elements that feed into and out of each other: much like the communities these artists are part of and the essential intergenerationality of feminism.

Brennan’s sculptural work invites the viewer to be part of this cyclicality and to make gestures, leaving a translation of these processes behind. She has made a voluminous sculpture that can be touched, that extrudes, and leaves what is squeezed out. She is inviting the viewer to re-create the gestures that Maher made through the sculptures.

Subverting the representation of women’s bodies is another tenet that brings these three artists, and their wider practices, together.  The bemonstering of the female form is a repeated notion throughout the exhibition. Each presents the female figure in a non-subjective and non-sexualised way. Maher chooses to flatten and continues to squeeze. In Vox Hybrida she embraces the grotesque – seeing the wood block squeezing onto the page like her hands on the sculptures, giving the wood its own language. It is the wood, the nature and texture of the plain with ‘mistakes’ – knots, imperfections – representing the holes of the body. The openings that connect us to the world outside of our contained sacks – ears, anus, eyes.

The notion of tension and force runs between Brennan and Maher’s work. Brennan is interested in how to visually communicate weight, height, and depth of the body. We can understand these invisible forces through their impact. Brennan visualises tension as a spilling out and as a voluminous form in contrast to Maher’s version of tension as something being flattened and taut. In her work she often works through a process of distorting and subverting the female body through volumising and morphing the figure into another shape. Like Austin, Brennan’s immediate response to Maher’s work was through her own gesture: translating the tension of the prints with her own body to create a performance and the work.

Brennan often uses dough, or the bases of flour and water to create a non-objectifiable version of her own body, or an extension/attachment of her body.  For the video and performance pieces she has used fabric to extend or push the narrative aside from her physical body while keeping the body present. She also creates a spilling. This spilling is the energy she passes through the draping of fabric over her body and the sculpture. She is creating a tension, countering Maher’s flattening through volumising.

The birth of Vox Materia came from Maher’s research for a 2018 show in The Source Arts Centre, Tipperary, when she found a carving of a mermaid in Kilcooley Abbey. More grotesque than the familiar depiction, it inspired her to think of the melding of animal and human, nature and culture, and the messy (often liquid) place where all of these meet. It was at this time that Maher was heavily involved in the Repeal the 8th campaign and reflecting on the voices of women in Ireland being taken from them throughout history.  Historically women have had to be silent and contained to fit within accepted convention: their voices and bodies forced to conform and fit into a tight space, unable to spill over or out. These hand sculptures are the spilling. They could even be seen as representations of women’s tongues. They are parallel to the female voice and consciousness-raising activity of Repeal.

The voice, the subversion (or celebration) of the grotesque, these gestures of spilling, reflect mythological depictions of women. Universal narratives that permeate throughout our visual histories. This exhibition is a subversion of those myths that centred on the silence of women’s voices. The mermaid whose voice was taken; her tongue literally cut out to become human. Cassandra (referenced in Maher’s 2012 film), often depicted historically in art as hysterical and cursed with her truth not being believed.  Echo, who was only left with her voice, her words, and no physical presence so her only gesture could be her words, is very much reflected in Austin’s An Attached Screaming. A reclaiming of these voices can be found throughout every step of this exhibition, through each artist’s physical gesture.

When Maher was invited to show at the Golden Thread Gallery, she wanted to take the opportunity to platform intergenerational practice through inviting emerging, locally-practicing artists, highlighting how essential it is for generations of women to keep fighting for space and voice. The two invited artists have responded to Alice Maher’s work through their own physical movement. This movement could be seen as a queering of the language, breaking away from the patriarchal constructs, and going back to our early forms of pre-Christian and therefore pre-patriarchal communication of gesture and storytelling. The fluidity of the show, the movement between gesture, tension and voice, grounds the three artist practices in the wider hydrofeminist notion that we are not isolated but merge into one another.

About the Artists

Golden Thread Gallery is supported by: