Jacqueline Fahey

Biography

Fahey is of Irish-Catholic ancestry and was born in Timaru in 1929. She was educated at Teschemakers, a now-closed Catholic boarding school for girls, near Oamaru. She then studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1952.

Fahey has three children and was married to prominent psychiatrist Fraser McDonald, who she met at a party at her flat in Wellington. During her married life, Fahey and her family lived in psychiatric institutions in Australia and New Zealand. Fraser died in 1994.

Fahey has written two memoirs about her life: Something for the Birds (2006) and Before I Forget (2012).

Career

Jacqueline Fahey studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1952.

Fahey has been an active painter since the 1950s. She is credited as being one of the first painters in New Zealand to paint from a female perspective and examine the domestic subjects of contemporary women's existence: children, the home, marriage, community life, and relationships. During many of her years as a practising artist, Fahey did not have a studio, but instead painted on a trolley, surrounded by the activities and energy of her family and household. Fahey has said:

"Art should come from what an artist knows about life, and if what a woman knows is not what a man knows, then her art is going to have to be different."

Fahey's paintings depict the detail, disorder and minutiae of domestic life, but simultaneously disrupt it, by playing with perspective and space within and across the image's frame. Objects pile on top of each other, surfaces are intricately patterned, and figures merge with their surroundings. The oil painting Christine in the Pantry (1973), held in the collection of Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru, is an example of Fahey's manipulation of space, patterning, and depiction of everyday, prosaic objects. The women in Fahey's paintings often look directly out at the viewer, challenging or questioning the gaze directed at them. For example, in the painting Final Domestic Expose - I paint Myself (1981-1982), held in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Fahey is shown calmly contemplating the viewer whilst surrounded by a maelstrom of children, food, washing, cosmetics, and other objects associated with family life.

In 1964, Fahey organised an exhibition with artist Rita Angus at the Center Gallery in Wellington. This exhibition included an equal number of female and male artists and was one of the first exhibitions in New Zealand to take intentionally gender balanced curatorial approach.

Due to their subject matter and approach, Fahey's paintings are closely associated with the wider societal women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Her work increased in prominence in the 1980s, through galleries such as the Women's Gallery, established in Wellington in 1980, which sought to provide exposure to women's art and question the often patriarchal structures of the art world and market.

In 1980, Fahey was awarded a QEII Arts Council Award to travel to New York and study painting.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Fahey taught painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.

In 2007 Fahey's paintings Christine in the Pantry (1972) and Sisters Communing (1974) were included in the major exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Fahey's paintings can be found in major public and private art collections across New Zealand, including Victoria University of Wellington's art collection, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Christchurch Art Gallery, Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru, and the Hocken Collection at the University of Otago.

She was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art in the 1997 New Year Honours. In 2013, she received an Arts Foundation Icon Award, the Foundation's highest honour.

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Publications