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.