Custom House Studios + Gallery cordially invites you to the official opening reception for False Kingdom a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Kaye Maahs on Thursday 21 August at 6pm.
Exhibition continues until Sunday September 14 2025.
Under the Scim: the Magic in Kaye Maahs’ Paintings
By Cristín Leach
Kaye Maahs is a beautiful painter, rigorously and instinctively so. She can tell when a painting is working, and she knows absolutely when it is not. She has, in the past, thrown paintings out the studio window when she sees that they have failed. These days, perhaps tempered by experience, she is more likely to wipe the surface completely clean and start again tomorrow. Maahs works wet into wet, which means each painting is made in one go and never allowed to dry until it is finished. Wiping one of her larger pieces away, she could be removing up to twelve hours of intense labour. When an artist can paint this well, the more complicated question is what to paint? Maahs made her name quickly with compellingly vibrant land and seascapes. Her new solo show, False Kingdom, at the Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport, is part of a series of works about something different. And it marks ten years since her graduation from a fine art painting degree at GMIT in Galway, aged 45.
In ‘The Night King’, a bat is caught stark, white against black: a nocturnal presence, a majestic one. ‘The Night Caller #2’ shows an Irish Plume Moth almost bone-like, skeletal, T-shaped and other-worldly, looking at us. Froggy eyes surface as if posing an amphibious question in ‘Water Treader’. In ‘The Night Traveller’, a thin-winged moth looks slightly off kilter, battling an unseen foe. These paintings speak of cyclical and circadian rhythms, of night beings, busy while we are asleep, alert when we are not.
The Irish word scim describes a thin coating of particles on a physical surface, but it can also mean something more nebulous: a supernatural film that covers the land, a gauzy barrier between worlds, the threshold between consciousness and sleep, a leap between intuition and logic. It has something to do with a different kind of wisdom. It’s a word Maahs found in the writing of Manchán Magan, and a word that works well with the shiny, slipperiness of her chosen ground and medium: oil paint on aluminium. These new paintings are not landscape paintings, but they speak of the land and of feelings, memories and mysteries carried in the harbingers of place.
Growing up in Kerry, Maahs had a childhood of “piseogs [superstitions] and customs, pagan Brigid and a rag outside the door.” Now Clare-based, she puts a piece of canvas with ribbons out overnight on Imbolc or St Brigid’s Eve, a Brat Bríde as artist talisman, still in keeping with the ritual. False Kingdom is a show about childhood intuition, adult observation, and “paint, juicy paint!”. Maahs describes her practice as “devoted to paint”. In her hands, oil paint embodies feeling and pigment puts lush, visual pleasure on emotion parsed through experience.
‘Queen for a Day’ depicts a daisy chain, a childhood game, a decoration, a spell. A collaboration between human and nature, it’s a perishable gesture of friendship and hope. Flowers begin to die the minute they are picked, but in a world of abundant wilderness there are always more. Daisies close their eyes at dusk and open again with the sun. Maahs often uses the word “magic” when she talks about her work, and when she speaks of the serendipities, connections, kindnesses and moments of luck that have brought her to this point in her painting life. A gestural painter, form comes from the brushstrokes. Perspective, shadow, and three-dimensionality is all built in the moment of application. She is wary of making the surfaces too smooth, wants the brush-lines to remain visible.
One of the most beautiful paintings in this show, ‘The King’s House (Will You Weep When I am Gone)’ depicts a bird’s nest, suspended like a ball of loose twine. The painting of it is technically stunning. The object hangs in green space, the painter’s eye focused on its inherent dynamism and singular presence, and on the strange speediness of it all. This is a key facet of Maahs work: the movement of the wet strokes is a motion that remains in the dried paint. Despite its static nature, each of these works feels like a living, breathing scene. That all of Maahs finished work feels like this in the moment of encounter brings to mind the bright, dancing feel of the Irish word for life: beo.
Although ‘Warning Sign’ is a painting of a dead crow tied up by its feet with red string, the swoosh of the brushstrokes works like a memory of the former-speed of the bird’s wings. There are portents of the dangers of human interaction with nature as a gill-breather breaks the surface of an algal-bloom-threatened lake in ‘Gasp’, and ‘Corncrake Feather’ offers a reminder of an endangered rural presence. Maahs does not work directly from observation, although observation is key. When she is painting a bird or bat she is recalling every image and memory of that subject in her mind, painting object, record and feeling, working to convey emotion in the paint, through the paint.
Her moth paintings are inspired by Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Moths’, which describes summer as “a place mislaid between expectation and memory”. Moths are drawn to the artificial glow of a street lamp in ‘Chasers of the Light’, carry unspoken information in ‘The Messengers’, and are seen as repositories of collective cultural consciousness the title of the painting ‘Winged Soul’. In her studio, Maahs speaks of the Irish folklore associated with dandelions and hares, of the beauty of cobwebs, and the whiff of honeysuckle “like nature’s chandeliers”. Stuck to the wall are lists of handwritten words and phrases: suspended, scent, thorn, bare (feet), a dancing crow, underground, veiled. A single dandelion seed parasol in the painting ‘On We Go’ might grant wishes together with an ability to spread and thrive on the wind, but there’s a counter-reminder of the cycle of life and death in the de-seeded deadhead she paints in ‘Time Waits for No One’.
That these are mostly small paintings is significant. They are intimate windows onto something shared: myth combined with memory, bright beauty and dark undertones, a moment of surface recognition with deeper resonance, a reminder to look. ‘Sugar Surge (Sunday Trifle)’ with its turbulent red base and sprinkle-topped peaks resembles a candy-hued landscape in as much as it is a family desert. Offering a child’s-eye view from a table-top perhaps, it’s a reminder of the slide between worlds that can happen when the eye and the mind are playing and open to magic. Like the clear sky full of stars and possibility as the land lies low in the painting ‘Portal’ or the entrance to the underworld suddenly underfoot in ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’.
In his memoir, Walking with Ghosts, the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne writes about “things we cannot explain away… other worlds beyond what we can see with human eyes”. To paint such worlds requires a leap of vision as much as a leap of faith. Maahs’ influences include the painters Basil Blackshaw and Camille Souter, and there are similarities too in the work of Pat Harris. The works in False Kingdom are alive, full of rigorous ambition and focused attention. There is a certain bounce between the shiny hard surface of the aluminium and the glossy oil paint, a resistance she overcomes by working without pause until it is done; and Maahs is prolific.
These paintings take a week to dry. They capture something that is more than visual. They speak of indigenous knowledge and traditions part-lost with colonisation, of parallel realities, of a rural childhood, of knowing things you can’t quite put your finger on, and believing in truths that might need to be felt more than seen. They are a reminder of what can happen in 24 hours or less: a single field mushroom is glorified in ‘Fás aon Oíche’ [grow-in-one-night, or ‘mushroom’ in Irish]. Overnight fungi become the building blocks of a fairy circle and a reminder of unseen connections deep underground in the painting ‘Superstition’. There are cobwebs and murmurations, creatures that glow in the dark, insects that live short, transformative lives. A ladybird clings like a trapeze artist to a stem in ‘The Fall Guy’. A single tadpole shimmies by in ‘Guilty Party’. Maahs paints with a lightness of touch that belies the gravity of her thinking and approach. She says, “my mother stopped putting me in dresses when I was five. I kept coming back with cut knees” (‘The Ultimate Tom Boy’). This is her world, but it is as universal as it is personal, offering a glimpse at a connected soul and a return to uncensored, childlike imagination as a reminder to remember the importance of all this.
Image: Kaye Maahs, 'Wasserhexe (Water Witch) ', Oil on Alluminium, 15x 20cm
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