Cork In 50 Artworks, No 40: Cell, by Alice Maher, at Kilmainham Gaol 

The ball of briars touched on themes around Easter Rising of 1916, but also the H-Block prisoners and the Troubles in the North

Alice Maher was living in Skiddy's Almshouse in Cork in the early 1990s when she worked on Cell. Picture: Michael Mac Sweeney/Provision

 In a State: An Exhibition on National Identity was a project initiated by the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 1991. Twenty-one artists were each invited to create an artwork that would be installed in a cell at the museum at Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 had infamously been imprisoned and executed. 

 The exhibition has since become the stuff of legend, remembered for having showcased the output of a new, dynamic generation of artists such as Alice Maher, Dorothy Cross and Rita Duffy.