Portfolio : current work
Link to Artist Statement & Bio
Habitat Series
Each collage in the Habitat series centers on an animal—or group of animals—whose living range is being reduced or reshaped through human activity. These figures are drawn from archival image sources, including the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, then carefully isolated and reprinted on inkjet washi. Removed from their original contexts, they become both specimen and witness.
Set against this, ink elements drawn from my ongoing library of shodō-influenced marks cut across the surface. Originally painted on Arturo blue paper and cut out by hand, leaving a slight edge, these lines carry a different kind of record: gesture, breath, and time. Where the archive fixes and names, the brushstroke moves—suggesting forces less easily contained.
Continued: https://miranda-maher.com/habitat/
Lands Yet Undiscovered
I generally construct my collage work through three interwoven layers. In Lands Yet Undiscovered, the foundation is a circular map of Antarctica—each one drawn from the era of its Western exploration, when vast regions were still marked by absence. The phrase “Land Yet Undiscovered,” taken from these maps, names not only geographic uncertainty, but a mindset: a projection of ownership onto what was not yet known, measured, or claimed.
Centered within each map is an inked enso—a Zen circle that gestures toward cycles of time beyond human mapping. Where the map seeks to define, the enso opens: a mark of continuity, emptiness, and the limits of knowledge.
The third layer consists of small, carefully placed elements drawn from decorative papers—Indian marble paper or Japanese chiyogami—introducing moments of pattern, interruption, and quiet ornament: small interruptions that echo trade, exchange, and the circulation of material culture that accompanied exploration
The Milky Way (Folded) The Very Old and Very Young
This ongoing series draws from historical celestial charts that map the Milky Way in segmented sections, each designed to render greater detail. I trace these star fields in white ink, reassembling them into a continuous, luminous band that stretches across the surface.
Moving through this field are clusters of imagery drawn from antique natural history illustrations: a dense column of fishes, an expanding field of eggs, a writhing array of snakes, and dispersed clouds of insects. These forms, reprinted on washi and mounted on handmade Japanese paper, drift across the Milky Way like constellations of earthly life.
Continued: https://miranda-maher.com/the-milky-way-folded-the-very-old-and-very-young/
Big – Little – Tiny
This series brings together three orders of scale on 28 × 44 inch sheets of handmade paper. A brush-drawn Milky Way, rendered in white ink, stretches across the surface—its form traced from a specific historical depiction. The Earth enters as fragments of historical maps or celestial charts, partial and mediated. Within the field created by these two vast frameworks, a single genus of minute terrestrial creatures inhabits each drawing.
The work stages a collision of magnitudes: the cosmic, the planetary, and the nearly unseen. Each element is filtered through systems of representation—astronomical mapping, cartography, scientific illustration—revealing how scale is not only perceived, but constructed.
Continued: https://miranda-maher.com/big-little-tiny-series/
Infestations Series
We don’t have infestations of wildflowers or flamingos. Infestation implies vermin… but it’s a human value judgment that a species is vermin or a weed. They are in the way or un-beautiful… or destructive to what we’ve decided to value. But from outside a human view, they’re simply living, even thriving. Oblivious to our preferences.
In this series I have combined my meditative ink line-shapes with edited prints of (mostly) birds of prey from Audubon’s nineteenth century catalog of American birds. The birds squabble or devour their prey sitting on or between the black ink elements, oblivious to them. You could take the view that either element could be an infestation of the other, but given human tendencies, the birds are the more likely culprits.
Wild Rivers
In Wild Rivers, I map selected rivers of the Earth in a decorative, unruly visual language—forms that bend, tangle, and elaborate beyond strict geography. Titles carry a sense of personality, inviting a more intimate, relational encounter. The work leans into a human attraction to what is ornate and visually seductive, using that impulse as an entry point.
Each piece is built through layered collage and ink. River forms are drawn and reworked by hand, often embellished with patterned or decorative papers, allowing the compositions to exceed the logic of conventional maps. The materials themselves—cut, assembled, and adjusted—mirror the shifting, meandering nature of the rivers they depict.
Beneath the playfulness is another orientation. In many older cultures, rivers were understood as living presences—beings to be honored rather than managed. By contrast, contemporary mapping often renders them as systems to measure, divide, and control. Here, mapping becomes less an act of definition than of recognition.
Earth’s Rivers Depart
In this ink and cut-paper series, I push the limits of an extremely delicate Chinese calligraphy paper known as “Cicada Wing.” The river forms are painted in reverse on the back of the sheet, then layered with Indian marble paper on the front and additional papers on the reverse. The result is both constructed and translucent—an image that hovers within the material rather than sitting on its surface. The works are inherently fragile, and that fragility is integral to their presence.
The series is guided by a speculative fiction: what if the planet became so inhospitable to its waters that they simply withdrew? What if rivers, oceans, and currents—long subjected to human extraction, redirection, and contamination—reached a point of refusal? The premise carries a note of humor, but it also reflects a shifting reality. The anthropomorphism is intentional, a way of exposing the imbalance in how we imagine agency: we act upon water as if it were passive, even as its absence would be catastrophic.
Visions Obscure my Vision
It often feels like our ability to see…our life, the world, the universe… is just out of reach. We can perceive glimpses of what might be Truth or Reality through the noise of our fears, hopes and other shifting illusions; but consistent clarity is not possible. This series of 10 collages combines prints of 5 meticulously observed moons from history with roiling, flowing shapes of my own ink marks and colorful cut-outs of Indian marble paper. The moons are printed in soft tones to recede… but the structure of the maps are quite present and hold the whole together.
Each of the five moons is used twice to create pairs that can be shown together or not. Media: Collage: reproductions of maps of the moon (1704-contemporary) printed on Unryu Inkjet washi, mounted to Magnani 300g/m2 cotton paper; Overlayed with Sumi Ink brush strokes (painted on Arturo text, cut out and adhered) and Indian marble paper. Each, 12.6” diameter.
click on thumbnail for larger view.
