Miranda Maher
Miranda Maher is a Brooklyn-based artist whose collage and artist’s-book practice examines human relationships to animals, ecosystems, and the materials of natural history. Her work is often visually intricate and inviting, but it begins with questions about habitat loss, extinction, extraction, and the ways human language assigns value to other forms of life.
Maher grew up in a home where art was present through books, reproductions, and encouragement. Her father, a self-described “Sunday painter,” introduced fiction, history, and art history into family life. Although original works were beyond the family’s means, prints of major works were everywhere, including Botticelli, Caravaggio, Japanese prints, and Degas’s dancers in Maher’s childhood bedroom. Both parents supported her interest in art and dance classes, making creativity a normal part of her early life.
She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, focusing on printmaking at both institutions. While she no longer makes traditional prints, the discipline has continued to shape the structure of her practice. Maher works in multiples and series, developing an idea through variation rather than attempting to resolve it in a single piece. This serial approach supports research, play, and sustained investigation.
Over a studio practice of more than thirty-five years, Maher has worked in several forms. From the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, she made conceptually based installations and artist’s books addressing political issues. Over the past decade, her work has become more contemplative and has focused primarily on collage and artist’s books on paper.
Her projects often begin with image research. Maher searches academic and library image collections, vintage books, and historical archives, following visual connections that lead into new areas of inquiry. A particular paper can also initiate a series: translucency, pattern, and other material characteristics determine how an image is handled and what kind of composition it can become.
Maher refers to herself, with some humor, as a “natural history artist.” The term points to nineteenth-century artists and illustrators who catalogued plants and animals encountered through exploration. Their meticulously detailed images are a recurring source for Maher’s collages, but she uses them to question rather than celebrate the assumptions built into systems of classification and representation.
The emotional basis of this work is often anxiety or grief about habitat loss and other-than-human extinction. Yet the finished works are not simply mournful. They may be playful, decorative, or celebratory, using beauty to hold a viewer’s attention long enough for a more difficult idea to emerge. Maher is interested in discrepancies between popular assumptions and more complicated realities: the belief that rivers exist for human use, for example, versus an understanding of rivers as living bodies of water with histories beyond human ownership.
Her influences include Audubon’s bird studies, Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of plants and marine life, Anna Mendieta, Annette Messager, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, and early Italian Renaissance artists including Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, and Fra Angelico. Together, these references support a practice attentive to visual precision, accumulation, repetition, poetic association, and the symbolic possibilities of historical images.
Maher’s Infestations series developed from her research into Audubon’s Birds of America and other nineteenth-century illustrations, many of which depict animals in aggressive postures. Living in Brooklyn also shaped the series. The city’s familiar “infestations,” including rats, mice, roaches, mosquitoes, and invasive plants, are continually managed as problems. Maher’s work complicates that framing, asking what these creatures look like once human-imposed categories are set aside. They are not inherently invasive in an ethical sense. They are simply living according to their own needs in places humans have decided belong to us.
Her studio practice is structured but not rigid. She divides time between making art, teaching, and seeing private clients. Research, downloading, and printing may happen at home, while cutting, gluing, ink painting, and final composition take place in the studio. When she feels blocked, Maher still goes to the studio, but turns to what she calls “donkey work”: cleaning, organizing, and preparing elements for future collages.
Maher practices and teaches Taoist meditation and Qigong, both of which inform her worldview without becoming direct subject matter. Ideas of interdependence, change, and responsibility to the wider world shape the work, as does a rejection of hyper-individualism and human hierarchy.
She is currently continuing a collage series titled Milky Way Folded: Some Things Are Very Old and Other Things Are Very Young. Each 28 by 40 inch work combines an ink-painted Milky Way with vintage botanical or biological illustrations, including eggs, fish, reptiles, and sea creatures. The series extends Maher’s sustained interest in history, scale, natural life, and the visual systems through which people attempt to understand them.
