We went to Alice Maher's exhibition, "Natural Artifice", at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday. Alice gave a talk there in January which sadly we missed, but this weekend we went to a gallery talk by Gill Perry, Head of Art History at the Open University, about the exhibition and about Alice's work in general.
The exhibition includes work in a variety of media. A series of photographs explore Alice's relationship with nature as she wears a hood of moss, a helmet of snail shells and a collar of hearts; large scale charcoal drawings are inspired by Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delight"; a human sized "ice bed" and a miniature house of thorns play with ideas of comfort and discomfort and subvert the familiar.
The talk brought up issues which we've been thinking about within our own practices; questions about working broadly with an assortment of materials and processes on a range of themes which sometimes appear to be unrelated. It was reassuring to see the links in Alice's work which have appeared over a considerable length of time. Something for us to think about more when we write about each other's work.
