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Archived Exhibition
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The Map and The Mantle

Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon

1 February — 12 April 2025
Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, installation view of <em>The Map </em>at Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre, courtesy of the artists.
Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, installation view of The Map at Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre, courtesy of the artists.
  • Date 1 February — 12 April 2025
  • Opening Hours

    Tuesday to Saturday, 10am—5pm
    Closed Bank Holidays
     

About the Artist(s)

Alice Maher has produced some of the most iconic images in contemporary Irish art. Her work is embedded in the realms of nature and culture, subversion and transformation, mythology and memory. Her work encompasses drawing, sculpture, print, textiles, photography, installation, and film. Alongside her individual practice, Maher is known for her collaborations with other artists, dancers, composers, and writers such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Aideen Barry, Junk Ensemble, Trevor Knight, and the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of her 30-year practice in 2012. Her works can be seen in many international collections including Boston Fine Art Museum, The Hammer Museum, The British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, IMMA, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, the Crawford Gallery, the Ulster Museum, and the Arts Councils North and South. She was a founder member of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Rachel Fallon is a visual artist who makes work around themes of protection and defence, looking at territorial wars in domestic and maternal spaces and addressing the topic of women’s relationships to society. Her work encompasses sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance and is firmly rooted in the processes of making.

As well as an individual practice, she regularly collaborates with Irish and international artists and collectives; including Artists‘ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, Desperate Artwives, Grrrl Zine Fair, and The Tellurometer Project. The two disparate ways of working fed into one another and are therefore equally important parts of her practice. She is a founding member of pff publications - a feminist zine. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, the National Museum of Ireland, and Goldsmiths Womens‘ Art Library, U.K.

The Map

Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon have created a monumental textile sculpture. The Map is a mobile, hanging piece, viewed from front and back. The richly worked surface presents an epic Mappa Mundi, in which the elements of the cartographer’s practice are used as a device to imagine and re-imagine the life, legacy and mythology of the Magdalene and its impact on women's lives.

An alternative topographic and psychic landscape is uncovered in this witty and complex un-picking of the established narrative around Mary Magdalene, with its own continents, winds, currents and constellations. This giant cloth map comprises embroidered, knitted, sewn, painted, appliqued, printed and found components around which the viewer can move.

The artists utilise the iconography of Renaissance maps and medieval tapestries, as well as the language of Victorian ‘cartes de tendre’ and moral schemas such as ‘the Pilgrim's Progress’, in order to subvert and challenge the very belief systems and power structures these maps were established to uphold.

"Maps are neither mirrors of nature nor neutral transmitters of universal truths. They contain silences as well as articulations, secrets as well as knowledge, lies as well as truth." The Sovereign Map: Theoretical approaches to cartography throughout history by Jacob, Conley and Dahl

In this spirit, the obverse side of the piece reveals the alternative patterns and abstract systems which occur in the making and applying of this, or any, schematic representation or world-view. The artists’ collective experiences, formed through making banners and performative garments used during the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, have lent this work a certain continuum in terms of activist cultural practice.

The intense amount of work devoted to the piece becomes, for them, a small tribute to the invisible labour of the unnamed women of this country, who carried the label and endured the unjustified shame of ‘Magdalene’.

The Mantle

The Mantle is a new work by Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon addressing the subject of dress, pattern and language as vehicles for social control, particularly in the colonialist context. After premiering at The Irish Arts Center in New York, the work will be exhibited for the first time in Ireland opening on Brigid’s Day.

In 1462, a tax was imposed in Ireland on the wearing of the ‘Irish’ mantle, a huge cloak worn by both sexes at the time, in an effort to introduce the ‘new order’ and suppress the old.

Four years later, the wearing of traditional saffron tunics was also outlawed. Clothing patterns held social significance, with ‘the stripe’ being used as a tool of classification in many different western cultures. The Sachsenspiegel Law of 1220 reserved striped attire for bastards, serfs, criminals, clowns, prostitutes, traitors and heretics. And while that reading of pattern has changed over the centuries, the stripe is still a mark of difference or outsider status whether negative or positive.

Indigenous languages are often suppressed or subsumed, as was the Irish language, and yet they too surface in myriad expressive ways. The interlacing Celtic knotwork of early scribes is inspiring breakthrough scientific research by scientists today. This textile sculpture employs colour, pattern, symbol and text to uncover and discover the many ways in which suppression is not always followed by annihilation, but can lead to a hyper-branching of culture and to ever more creative and inclusive forms.

The exhibition is accompanied by We Are The Map, a text and soundscape by Sinéad Gleeson and Stephen Shannon in response to the work. We Are The Map was commissioned by Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre and the artists to accompany The Map.

Acknowledgements

The Map by Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher was commissioned by Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre as part of The Magdalene Series curated by Maolíosa Boyle, funded by The Arts Council, Creative Ireland, and South Dublin County Arts Office. The Mantle was created for and first shown at the Irish Arts Center in New York, presented as part of New York Textile Month 2024.

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Archived Exhibition
Installation view of <em>We Are The Map</em> by Sinéad Gleeson and Stephen Shannon at Rua Red South County Dublin Arts Centre.

We Are The Map

Sinéad Gleeson and Stephen Shannon

1 February — 12 April 2025
Commission 
Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, installation view of <em>The Map</em> at The Dock, courtesy of the artists. Photo by Ros Kavanagh.

Mapping the Folds

Text by El Reid-Buckley

12 April 2025
Commission 
Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, detail of <em>The Map </em>at The Dock, courtesy of the artists. Photo by Ros Kavanagh.

The Map and The Mantle

Text by Phillina Sun

12 April 2025

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