11th September 2025 – Exhibition

The Sibyls, Alice Maher

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 sibyls in the Sistine chapel. Maher’s Sibyls are different – rather than resting serenely in the architecture of institutional belief or patriarchal systems of meaning, these Sibyls 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.

FROM

11th September 2025
—11th October 2025

More