Vox Hybrida

Vox Hybrida

COLIN DARKE REVIEWS ALICE MAHER’S RECENT EXHIBITION AT GOLDEN THREAD GALLERY FEATURING RESPONSIVE ARTWORKS BY

Emma Brennan, The Body as Paradox (Part Three: The body), 2023, polymide elastane and flour; photograph Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.

Alice Maher, ‘Vox Hybrida’, 2018, hand tinted wood relief prints, installation view, Golden Thread Gallery; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.

ONE OF OUR earliest social interactions, as new-borns, comes from that initial squeeze of an adult finger. This early stage towards understanding our place in an unfamiliar world is met with an emotional response from the owner of that finger; our individual entrances into the complexities of history originate in love.

Such is human evolution over the past couple of million years. Our sense of touch and the dexterity that came with the opposable thumb drove us toward language and societal formations. The ever-changing empathetic relationships that derive from, and impact on, our historical social existence continue to struggle against the injustices that come from the same collective source.

The overall haptic qualities of ‘Vox Hybrida’ at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery (25 February – 8 April), along with its confluence of alienation and solidarity, evoke this conflict. The exhibition presents sculpture, prints and video by Alice Maher, with a number of responses to this work by early-career artists, Emma Brennan and Chloe Austin.

Vox Materia (2018), Maher’s installation of 23 bronze casts of clay, squeezed through her fingers, making negative casts and positive oozings, were initially rejected objects from the action of making other works, but were retrieved from the bin. Indeed, these waste products are somewhat scatological, but beautified by their retrieval.

Both of Austin’s pieces were made in response to these sculptures. Bones and Dust (2023) imagines and replicates the movements of Maher’s fingers as she

made them. This three-channel video shows Austin’s hands moving through compost, pushing through the soil, suggesting both the life-giving properties of the earth and the anxiety we feel at the thought of burial. For the second piece, An Attended Screaming (2023), she has cut and chiselled mirror-written text out of a dark MDF wall, phrases arrived at through interacting with Maher’s bronzes … I too will curve warping kinks this pressing of my tissue with force as strong as snub and shout … It reads as automatic writing, but this is belied by the laborious act of making. She has used this negative to print a positive by pressing fabric against the still-wet, pink-painted wall.

Brennan’s sculpture, The Body as Paradox (Part Three: The Body) (2023), hanging by chains from the ceiling, invites the audience to indulge its gentle masochism: “Please feel free to touch the sculpture. Take time, be gentle.” The hanging bags that make up the work have osmotically released flour from within, to form a powdery surface. Those who have touched the work have drawn lines and patterns in the flour and one has appropriately left the print of their hand.

This piece echoes the works in Brennan’s overlapping show at PS2, ‘Girlín: The Conception of Air’ (16 February – 11 March), which included a video of her moving, naked, with and against a mass of bread dough. She says of this work that it “reflects [her] lived experience as a queer, Irish, female-identifying, living/ breathing being” and is “formed upon the four pillars of gestation, birth, life and death”. The latter state is seen in a related piece in that show, consisting of dried-up

dough, reduced to skeletal forms.

Similarly, in Maher’s dual-screen video, Cassandra’s Necklace (2012), a young woman explores the undulations of her silver-painted cave environment, as well as squeezing and pushing blackberries into her mouth. The necklace in the title is revealed at the end of the piece – made from tongues, cut out and unable to communicate, echoing Cassandra’s dilemma.

In a series of eight large wood block prints, Vox Hybrida (2018), Maher catches, in silhouette, figures dancing, falling, jumping. The woodgrain flattens out the forms and conceals their individual characteristics.

Brennan takes this work as the basis for The Mirror, a two-channel video (with back-to-back screens) which shows the artist slowly dancing before a bare gallery wall, using green-screen to fill her silhouetted body with an image of a silently talking mouth, thus inserting a silent ‘Vox’ into the ‘Hybrida’.

Along the length of one gallery wall runs a fully collaborative text piece. Made by rotating turns at dictating and writing by hand – Austin and Brennan in English and Maher in Irish – the single line summarises the show in its entirety, beginning and ending:

To rest and lay on the caves of your voice/words with hardened edges are spoken from a stone carved tongue [...] shifting lifting flesh water growing longing fattening stretching of tears salted fiery limbs opening.

Colin Darke is an artist based in Belfast. colindarke.co.uk