Alice Maher

Alice Maher is one of Ireland’s most prominent and prolific artists. From early exhibitions in the late 1970s to the present day, she has worked in every medium imaginable. She approached us with a desire to show her extensive archive online. This would serve to illuminate the connections that exist between works, either by theme, media or context. It would also serve as a chronological archive of her practice over almost 40 years, shown alongside a definitive repository of writing about her work, and with an exhaustive CV of group and solo shows.

The challenge was to show this volume of works and information in a way that was browsable, searchable, and sortable. We did this by making every scrap of information on the website into a link to other similar bits of information. There are no ‘dead-ends’ — every exhibition, essay and work connects to linked entries, with a familiar and unobtrusive system for the user.

Pages render according to the content shown on them, and all pages are editable by the artist in terms of layout and colour, so that the experience is always a response to the content and the work. This includes essay pages, where linked artworks can be laid out in the browser by the artist, following a robust and intuitive underlying grid system.