MaryKate Maher

I work with motifs, building a vocabulary that describes my thought patterns. My work is heterogeneous, combining hyper-realistic and bare, structural elements. I want the viewer to feel pulled between familiarity and unease.The work is a play between the formal and the narrative. One informs the other, suggesting deeper meanings while obfuscating easy interpretation. It is an attempt to find explanations for my relationship to the world and the anxiety I feel by the shifting identities it demands. The most recent work addresses the image of ‘home’ through a reoccurring archetype of a house. The image of the ‘house’, smudgy and blackened, takes the place of the Void. The House-as-metaphor, though generic in its physical shape, addresses the universal home shaped void in every person. One we attempt to fill by recreating the familiar. But in the act of recreation its image becomes something strange and uncanny.