Barber, F., 2003.

Hybrid histories: Alice Maher

This interview with the Irish artist Alice Maher raises questions around issues of Irishness, gender and hybridity in contemporary practice. Shifts in Maher's work from Neo-Expressionist painting in the mid-1980s to a more inclusive range of practices such as drawing, object-making or installation are also situated in relation to an ongoing project of the deconstruction of reductive tropes of Irish ethnicity. Her early work in Belfast involved a confrontation of the difficulties for a Southern Irish Catholic to position herself in relation to the ongoing political conflict in Northern Ireland. Neo-Expressionism is discussed as a strategy for the resistance to the oppressive treatment of Irish women by the Catholic Church. Maher's concern with female identity in this context then involved a shift towards an oblique engagement with Irish ethnicity through a concern with the multi-layered significance of landscape, focused around a series of site-specific works executed in France in the mid-1990s. These works have, in turn, for Maher, developed into a hybrid practice as a means of articulating more nuanced readings of Irish identity. The materials used in recent work - hair, tears, lambs' tongues - however, represent both a selective engagement with the abject and a performance of the primitive - a problematic area in terms of the ethnocentric categorizations of Irish femininity, yet one of whose contradictions Maher is fully aware. © Association of Art Historians 2003.