Text Written By Dr. Sarah Kelleher
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. Their faces are obscured, their skin a pallid green hue, like figures in early medieval devotional paintings. 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 sculptures sit on dark mirrored surfaces that double and distort their frozen forms and reflect the knotted towers of the drawings that loom above them.
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 prophecies 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 sybils in the Sistine chapel. Maher's Sybils are different - rather than resting serenely in the architecture of institutional belief or patriarchal systems of meaning, these Sybils 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.
Hair, either as substance or motif, is dense with symbolic and political significance in all cultures, particularly relating to the place of the feminine in society, myth and history, and has long been an important component in Maher's work. Keep (1992) was a tower of real human hair collected from both ends of this island, and bound into ropes to create a monolithic shape that was both fascinating and repulsive in its emotional charge. Her monumental drawings Ombres from 1996 depicted figures seen from behind, cloaked entirely in hair, and rendered in such a way that they became both figure and void –haptic portals into other psychic and spatial dimensions. In these new works, hair is no longer a veil or trace, but an active force bursting with its own energy. The repeated lines of the drawings grow and expand into a kind of monstrous viscera that appears to emanate from the very bodies of the sibyls themselves, while simultaneously striving to overpower them in its suffocating coils.
The hair that binds however, is also the braid that unravels. It spirals out in defiance of clarity or containment. Culturally coded as either dangerous or shameful depending on its context, hair becomes here a visual agent of instability. Are the Sybils 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. Gleaming, compressed objects, they defy easy categorization, suggesting perhaps molten thought, or some strange condensation expelled from the writhing forms above. Resting on darkly mirrored platforms, these sculptures offer both a visual and conceptual reflection of the chaotic masses of the drawings above. Here are two distinct visual languages speaking to each other, complicating and expanding meaning and resisting easy interpretation. This feedback loop between image and object, where associations shift and proliferate, is a strategy that Maher has explored through-out her career. Individually impossible to fix into clear meaning, they relate to and across each other, in an enigmatic language that sets the tone of the entire installation.
In this way, The Sybils stands as a continuation of Maher's long engagement with themes of language, silencing and the fierce effort of expression. The analogy to prophecy—and the failure to understand it—is significant here. In her 2-screen film Cassandra’s Necklace commissioned by IMMA in 2012, for example, Maher presented the figure of another seer from Greek myth, Cassandra, cast out in a strange underground cavern, disbelieved and ridiculed for her prophetic utterances. Voiceless but never powerless, this Cassandra wears as her breastplate a necklace of tongues that acts as a violent visual symbol of the disorder of language and its oppressive silencing.
In mythology and literature, the Sibyls’ messages are often lost or scattered, as in Dante’s Inferno. In Virgil's Aeneid, their prophecies are blown away like leaves. In Maher's drawings, the Sibyls' hair becomes a visual echo of this loss, of meanings ungrasped, voices unheard. The chaotic lines and overlapping forms of the drawings suggest the mutability of fate, the unreliability of narrative, the fragility of coherence itself.
One of the great challenges of encountering Maher’s works lies in resisting the temptation to resolve them into tidy mythic analogies. The danger is in leaning too heavily into narrative at the expense of the more urgent contemporary resonances the works carry. In the midst of urgent global uncertainty and trauma on so many fronts, it is not difficult to see these twisting masses of hair and melting forms as metaphors for our collective disorientation. Our sense of being overwhelmed, of drowning in formlessness, is not just aesthetic—it is a response to the volatility of our contemporary moment.
These forms in flux speak to the dissolution of stable narratives, the exhaustion of myth as coded instruction, the complexity of understanding, the collapse of certainty. Yet within that collapse and strain to communicate, lies a kind of radical potential. Can the dark pools at the feet of the drawings perform as scrying mirrors, quietly hinting at alternative futures, other meanings, other ways of being?
