VOX HYBRIDA is an exhibition by Irish artist Alice Maher, featuring responsive artworks from Emma Brennan and Chloe Austin.

Maher’s practice is dynamic, often utilising different media including painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography and installation. As one of Ireland’s most influential and respected artists, Maher has continued to intrigue audiences with her provoking often corporeal drawings and sculptures. She works within the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Brennan and Austin, chosen by Maher, are showing site specific video and performance work as part of the VOX HYBRIDA exhibition.

​

A commissioned text accompanies the exhibition, written by Anna Liesching:

“…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…”

 

Curated by Peter Richards, the exhibition is an exciting opportunity to witness Maher’s influence on a new generation of emerging artists, and their approach to the themes and ideas which have evolved through conversation and collaboration between the three artists.