Jaqueline Fahey profile
Well-known Auckland artist
and personality Jacqueline Fahey was born in Timaru, New Zealand,
in 1929. She is a distinguished painter, especially known for her
paintings of domestic and suburban life, and a writer. Her most
recent novel is Cutting Loose (David Ling, 1998). She will shortly
publish a memoir of her life up to the early years of her marriage
to eminent psychiatrist Fraser McDonald. Something for the Birds
(Auckland University Press, 2006) will be released for Mothers' Day
and was written, she says, out of respect and love for her own
mother, to preserve her mother's story as well as her own.
Jacqueline was educated at Teschemakers Catholic boarding school in
Timaru and began studying art, at the age of 16, at the Canterbury
College School of Art in Christchurch. She is now the only
surviving member of the group of renowned Canterbury women artists
that once included Rita Angus and Evelyn Page.
She began her career as a painter in the late 1950s. Marriage and
three children close together meant that the demands of family life
drew her away from painting. Luckily, however, by the late 1960s
she had taken it up again and has been painting and exhibiting ever
since.
Jacqueline was one of the first New Zealand artists to paint from a woman's perspective, choosing her subjects, materials and methods to express her feminist concerns. Even in highly conventional 1950s New Zealand, she was revealing in her painting the dreadful isolation of women in their suburban homes. In later years, she has moved on to urban scenes and more openly political subjects. In 1964, with Rita Angus, she organised an exhibition at Wellingtons Centre Gallery, which showed equal numbers of female and male painters and was almost certainly the first deliberately gender balanced public art show in this country.
Jacqueline has exhibited in many solo and group shows throughout her career. She was selected to represent New Zealand at the 1985 Sydney Perspecta and her work will be included in the 2007 exhibition 100 Feminist Painters, to be held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007.
Her memoir Something for the Birds will be launched on 19 April at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, which will also host a small exhibition of her recent paintings together with Fahey works from the University of Aucklands art collection.