Cover Note: Alice Maher’s Cell: An Archaeology of the Prison Image

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Alice Maher, Cell, 1991, Kilmainham Gaol, 6′ × 6′ × 6′, brambles.

The work, the labour and the striving . . . lays down layers of culture, creates an archaeology of image and concept for the future, a kind of mire or seedbed of possibilities. Art can re-imagine the past and preimagine the future and is often the sounding board for change. . . [T]he imaginative reservoir continues to ebb and flow and to leak and drip and be a threat as well as a continuous comforting irrigating presence in our lives.¹

Alice Maher’s Cell was originally constructed as a site-specific sculpture for the 1991 group exhibit In A State: An Exhibition in Kilmainham Gaol on National Identity. The installation claims the solitary prison cell not only as a site of political struggle and surveillance, but also as a historically aesthetic and discursive space, a pivotal site of Irish artistic production. Like many of Maher’s photographs, drawings, and installation pieces, Cell draws from organic material, with the “vernacular” objects of the natural world defamiliarized and rendered productively threatening. Maher’s recurring store of materials includes inverted trees, thorns, nests, berries, moss, snails, bees, even human hair and internal organs (lambs’ tongues and hearts featured in a 2003 Portrait series).² Assembled jointly from brambles collected outside Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol and Maher’s childhood home in County Tipperary, Cell structurally integrates personal memory and public history, as well as contemporary aesthetic culture.³ Intentionally conceived on a scale too large to be contained within the walls of the prison cell, the 6′ × 6′ × 6′ ball of brambles serves as a metonym for the human body in solitary confinement: an unwilling inmate pushing the limits of the prison architecture, appealing to an isolated window at the far end of the cell, Maher’s sculpture conveys the claustrophobia of the natural world contained within disciplined political space. Although Cell integrates Christian iconography of the crown of thorns, invoking a symbolic history of suffering and martyrdom, it also speaks beyond particular religious and political contexts to suggest an ongoing struggle for aesthetic resistance within scenes of state discipline and torture. The piece also invites the viewer into the intimate physical site of the individual prison cell. Maher urges us to encounter the material conditions of incarceration and to examine the multiple and often overlapping forms of spectatorship engaged by the prison as art gallery—for example, panoptical/disciplinary, alienated, empathetic, aesthetic.

The only contribution to In A State still on display in its original cell in Kilmainham’s East Wing, in the intervening seventeen years, Cell has noticeably diminished in size, its brambles decomposing and “going to dust slowly” with the passage of time. (See figure 1.) This transformation is a testament to the mutability of organic matter, the simultaneous persistence and decay of the imprisoned body in which “lives the miasma of history” and “the story of change.”⁴ Maher’s piece also recalls a long global history of aesthetic production as resistant practice within the space of solitary confinement— as relevant in the era of the Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib detentions as in post-1968 “Troubles”-era Ireland.

Figure 1.

Cell, 17 years later in Kilmainham Gaol; photo by Casey Jarrin, 2008.

One of Ireland’s most significant colonial prisons, Kilmainham Gaol operated from 1796 through 1924 and reopened in 1966 as a national heritage site and museum, most often memorialized for its 1916 executions. (See figure 2.) As displayed within that context, Cell thus invokes two centuries of Irish prison writing and art as resistant “speech”: the jail journals of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, John Mitchel, Joseph Campbell, Tom Clarke, Constance Markievicz, Bobby Sands; the Armagh women’s “dirty” protest; murals by Cumann na mBan; Grace Gifford’s Kilmainham Madonna, painted in 1923 and still visible in the cell directly adjacent to Maher’s piece.⁵ (See figure 3.) Maher describes the original political and historical

Figure 2...