Reservoir: Sketchbooks & Selected Works (2014)

‘Reservoir’ showcases artist Alice Maher’s never-before-seen collection of sketchbooks and notebooks spanning her entire career. These colourful, playful and evocative documents are placed alongside some of Maher’s pivotal artworks, inviting the reader to study how the artist drew from her ‘reservoir’ to form the cornerstones of her career. The work allows an exploration of the complex flow between inspiration and finished pieces.

The publication includes a designers’ note:

‘In early 2014 we met Alice Maher outside Partry in County Mayo. We spent the day in her studio looking through work, sketchbooks and collected ephemera, marking out potential content with brightly coloured Post-it notes. Late in the afternoon, we all went for a walk with her dog on the bog nearby. As we walked, the topic of discussion was the book that would be the outcome of this collaboration. Our hope was that it might illustrate her own working method in a way that previous publications had not. It was on this walk that she described her working method: ideas, notes and observations gathering, mixing, and flowing into her work. This process – the pool of images, thoughts and dreams streaming into completed work – has inspired the structural and aesthetic design of this book. It was important to us to show sketches and words as we had encountered them, in the full context of the spreads they inhabited, and to leave a trace of our shared marking system.’

A collectors’ edition was also produced, accompanied by a limited edition print and housed in a bespoke screen-printed slipcase.