Irish Arts Center, New York
6 September 2024 – 15 January 2025
Rachel Fallon and Alice Maher’s magisterial textile work The Map (2021) was installed at the Irish Art Center in New York during a febrile period ahead of the US election. Part of an occasional visual arts programme at IAC, it was suspended in the black box studio, approached verso so that the territories stitched and painted on its front were visible as floating shadows denuded of detail as you entered the theatre – ghosts of a terra incognita.
On its worked side, The Map offers a fantastical cartography of Mary Magdalene, her iconography, associations, and the ‘muddle of Marys’ and unnamed women in the Bible whose stories became bundled in with hers. Symbols associated with the Magdalene become sites. Spikenard Lighthouse beams across Ointment Bay. The seven devils driven out of her appear as a range of active volcanoes. Other geographical features pay tribute to her penitence, her lamentation at the base of the cross, her presence at the resurrection, and her 30 years of hermitage in the south of France.
The greatest territory of the map charts the world of female transgression that has become associated with the Magdalene, whose name (in Ireland) is synonymous with sin. The hot tubs of the City of Lovers sit on the Swamp of Transgressions, close to Country Girl Cove. Lest we forget what is being defended in the moral policing of women, the isle of Heterotopia is flanked by Utopia and Myopia. Above them float Hysteria and the Isle of Shits.
An island named The System carries the floorplans of laundries at High Park, Donnybrook, and Séan McDermott Street in Dublin and Sunday’s Well in Cork. Here, unwed mothers and other wayward and unruly women were incarcerated and forced into labour, their babies taken for adoption. At the bottom of The Map, The Nappery is stitched from scraps of old stained tablecloths above which drying racks whirl, named for the Ryan and McAleese Reports.
Three years in the making, The Map was first shown at Rua Red Gallery. The work takes on fresh associations in New York. Following the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, women’s reproductive rights have become a key electoral issue. As Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) reminds us, the control structure of the laundries was exported. In Hartman’s stories of young black women born after emancipation, the threat of the Magdalene House haunts those who dare pursue sexual relations outside of wedlock or across colour lines, to those who stay out too late, or draw attention to themselves.
The Map’s exhibition period was brief – a little under a month. It is outlasted by ‘Untying the Knots’, a small exhibition in the building’s public spaces that elaborates and extends the world of The Map. Suspended within the atrium, and visible from multiple levels, The Mantle is a new collaborative work, rich with roots and veins and a vocabulary of symbols rendered in embroidery, lace, and knotwork. In title, it refers to the Irish mantle, a loose woollen garment subject to prohibition under various sumptuary laws from the 15th century on. Across its surface in Gaelic script is a repeating call – Scaoilimis Gach Snaidhm – ‘Let us untie all the knots’. Fallon and Maher’s collaboration began on the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment (2015-18), and like the protest banners they designed, The Mantle is rendered in lush silks in shades of pink and yellow – an object of beauty as well as a testament to centuries of cultural suppression.
Each artist has taken a wall on the ground floor for an individual work. Drawn onto a white wall in charcoal, Maher’s Untying is a long braid, licking across the surface like a whip – women’s hair, so often subject to regulation, here becomes an emblem of freedom and power. Opposite, the fine white crochet of Fallon’s Measure by Knots stretches across a dark metallic surface like a network of nerves. It’s a medium Fallon deploys for its socio-historic associations, thinking of the women who made lace to support families during Ireland’s famine years, and the vast migration through New York that coincided with it.
Against the backdrop of a fractious and divided city, The Map and ‘Untying the Knots’ evoke women’s resistance across time and geographies. Acknowledging repression – historically, as well as in our own time – in these works, humour and beauty become an invitation to rally, to share stories, skills and knowledge.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator based in London. Her latest book, Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, was recently published by Thames & Hudson, while a touring exhibition of the same name, commissioned by Hayward Gallery and curated by Judah, is currently showing at Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. Both Maher and Fallon feature in the book, while Fallon’s Aprons of Power (2018) are presented in the exhibition.
hettiejudah.co.uk
