The Sibyls | Alice Maher at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Event Details

In ‘The Sibyls’, Alice Maher presents a series of monumental drawings of female figures entangled in, or twisting free from, vast snaking mounds of hair. At the base of these drawings the artist has placed small piles of highly polished, irregular objects—amorphous forms that resemble great globs of mercury.

The title of the series, The Sibyls, references the oracular women of archaic times, seers who lived apart from society and were believed to channel the prophesies of the divine. In Renaissance art these figures were transformed into biblical prophetesses, pictured holding scrolls or books, as in Michelangelo’s majestic turban-clad sibyls in the Sistine chapel. Maher’s Sibyls are different – rather than resting serenely in the architecture of institutional belief or patriarchal systems of meaning, these Sibyls are altogether more dynamic and equivocal. Their scrolls have morphed into chaotic skeins of hair; their turbans twisted into massive living organisms that envelop, extend from, and consume their heads, while their powerful bodies struggle and strain to impart their portentous message…

…Culturally coded as either dangerous or shameful depending on its context, hair becomes here a visual agent of instability. Are the Sibyls coming into being through this dense matrix of bodily material, or are they caught in the web of their own weaving? Are they rising or falling, emerging or succumbing? The signs are deliberately destabilising; their meanings are as slippery and shifting as the mysterious sculptural shapes tumbled below.’

Extract from an Accompanying Text written by Dr Sarah Kelleher.