Jacqueline Fahey

Jacqueline Mary Fahey (born 1929) is a New Zealand painter and writer.

Of Irish Catholic ancestry, Fahey was born in Timaru in 1929.

Fahey had strong female role models in her life: her mother was a pianist who attended the Melbourne Conservatoire of Music and worked as a professional pianist for 8 years before returning to New Zealand, and her grandmother taught at a Dominican Convent and was "very good at languages and loved history".

"These two women were my role models, really," Fahey has commented.

"They gave me the idea that women were supposed to excel even if it was primarily in the arts."

When she was eight, her family home, "Marchweil", burnt down and Fahey and her three sisters were sent to St Patrick's Dominican College, Teschemakers, Oamaru, a now-closed Catholic boarding school for girls, near Oamaru.

Fahey has been an active painter since the 1950s.

When she was 26, she exhibited her first paintings with suburbia and marriage as their theme at Harry Seresin's Coffee Gallery on Lambton Quay in Wellington, where she was working as a waitress.

In 1951, Fahey moved to Wellington and in 1956 she married Fraser McDonald, a young psychiatrist who she met at a party at her flat in Wellington.

During her married life, Fahey, McDonald, and their three daughters lived in houses on the grounds of psychiatric institutions in Australia and New Zealand, including the Carrington Hospital.

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

She was taught by Russell Clark, Bill Sutton, and Colin Lovell-Smith.

At university she also met and befriended Rita Angus, Doris Lusk, and Juliet Peter.

Though she wasn't influenced stylistically by these artists, she was inspired by their commitment to painting and to the seriousness with which they undertook their work.

Fahey has commented, "It wasn't so much that they influenced the way I painted. What they did was allow me to be professional, to think of it as my life."

In 1964, Fahey organised an exhibition with artist Rita Angus at the Centre 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 an intentionally gender-balanced curatorial approach.

Fahey has commented, "It was a huge social success, because, to my astonishment, Rita was very social. I mean, she had connections, and she got an ambassador to open it [the exhibition], and asked all the rich people, you know, the right people to ask to an opening, and it was very successful.

Owing 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.

During many of her years as a practicing artist, Fahey did not have a studio, but instead painted on a large trolley, surrounded by the activities and energy of her family and household and following the action as it unfolded.

As such, 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.

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

Specifically, Fahey wanted to "find out what circumstances helped women artists to survive in a male-dominated profession in New York".

In New York, Fahey stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, made contacts at A.I.R Gallery (the first all female artists cooperative gallery in the United States), and spent time with artists Sylvia Sleigh and Isabel Bishop.

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.

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

At the time of her appointment as lecturer, over half the painting students were women, but there were no women lecturers.

Fahey joined Robert Ellis (artist), Don Binney, and Dick Frizell on the painting staff and enjoyed the experience of teaching, learning alongside her students, and sharing ideas with her colleagues.

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.

Fraser died in 1994.

Fahey was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to art, in the 1997 New Year Honours.

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

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.

In 2013, she received an Arts Foundation Icon Award, the Foundation's highest honour.

Fahey 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.

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."