Nature and culture, the wild and the domestic are themes underlying all of Alice Maher’s work. In ‘Familiar I’ this is combined with a keen awareness of the debates in the art world about abstraction and figuration, about painting and sculpture. The monochrome colour field of the canvas, beloved by male painters in the 1980s is interrupted by the presence of a little white female figure, small but determined; the painting is accompanied by a skein of unbleached flax that resembles human hair. Are we looking at painting or sculpture, nature or art? This work defies conventional definition.