Jacqueline Fahey - Two Paintings. Produced by Aigantighe Art Gallery
Christchurch writer, art critic and cultural historian Dr Andrew Paul Wood examines two works by Jacqueline Fahey, 'Sisters Communing II' and 'Christine in the Pantry', both in the collection of the Aigantighe Art Gallery.
Transcription:
Kia ora.
Today in this talk, I will be looking at two paintings by Jacqueline Fahey from the E H McCormick Collection: Sisters Communing II (1990), oil and collage on board, 1070 x 1070 mm, purchased for the gallery by the Friends of the E H McCormick in 1990; and Christine in the Pantry (1972–1973), oil on board, 1010 x 693 mm, purchased by the gallery in 1978.
Very helpful to understanding Fahey's life is the fact that she has written two very readable memoirs: Something for the Birds (2006) and Before I Forget (2012). She was born here in Timaru in 1929 to an Irish Catholic family. Her mother, a professional pianist who studied at the Melbourne Conservatory of Music, was a prominent figure in her life. Her grandmother had taught at a Dominican convent. Both women instilled in her a love of the arts and a strong sense of independence.
When Fahey was eight, Markweil—the family home that lent its name to the suburb—burned to the ground. Fahey and her sisters were sent to boarding school at Teschemakers near Oamaru. After school, she studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1952.
The previous year, Fahey had moved to Wellington. Five years later, she married psychiatrist Fraser McDonald. They met at a party in her flat and went on to have three daughters together. Sadly, McDonald died in 1994, but his influence may help explain Fahey's interest in depicting psychological states through gesture, symbolism, and the pathetic fallacy—where a setting reflects a subject’s emotional state.
Fahey had her first exhibition at age 26 at Harry Seresin’s coffee gallery on Lambton Quay in Wellington, where she also worked as a waitress. Interestingly, while her husband professionally advocated for women to work rather than remain at home, Fahey’s paintings are all about domesticity and suburbia.
Although feminism and women's liberation were beginning to stir in mid-20th-century Aotearoa, married women were still largely confined to the role of homemaker. The art world was heavily male-dominated and patriarchal. Women’s art tended to reflect themes of domesticity, home, and children. But Fahey’s take was analytical, even forensic—her paintings interrogated why this was the case, often showing multiple generations of women trapped and overwhelmed by the domestic setting, in frustration and quiet desperation.
Fahey was one of the first New Zealand artists to paint from a female perspective. She 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." She also noted that if the arts assume what is normal and proper is male, upper-class, and Pākehā, then all other perspectives are as hard to grasp as a new language.
In 1964, Fahey came to wider public attention when she organised an exhibition with Rita Angus at the Centre Gallery in Wellington. Radical for its time, it featured a gender-balanced curatorial approach with equal numbers of male and female artists.
When the feminist movement took off in New Zealand in the 1970s, Fahey became something of an icon due to the female focus of her art. In 1980, she travelled to New York on a QEII Arts Council grant to study painting and, in her words, "find out what circumstances helped women artists to survive in a male-dominated profession." She lived at the famed Chelsea Hotel—heart of New York bohemia—and made connections with American women artists and collectives.
Fahey is a quintessential 1980s figure—a combination of feminist values, old class structures, and the glamour of a growing local art market. In the 1980s and ’90s, she taught painting at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, one of the first female appointments as a fine arts lecturer. She was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art in 1997, and in 2013, was awarded the New Zealand Arts Foundation Icon Award.
Christine in the Pantry was purchased by the gallery in 1978 with the Civic Jones Trust Fund and QEII Arts Council support. The subject, Christine Massey, was around 18 years old. The setting is Fahey’s Auckland kitchen. Christine's parents were reportedly displeased that she dressed like a hippie for the portrait, but Fahey set up an important visual relationship between her patterned dress and the pantry clutter.
As is common in Fahey’s work, the details are familiar and rooted in time: Cornishware crockery, a flower-like patchwork oven cloth. The rubbish bin and open drawer disrupt any idealised or modernist composition. She even distorts the perspective to show their contents. The painting is divided by a doorway, with Christine appearing shyly half-concealed. All lines converge on the red heart of the oven cloth—roughly aligned with Christine’s heart.
Given Fahey’s Catholic background, there may be an allusion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For much of her life, Fahey worked at home without a studio, and her domestic surroundings infiltrate her paintings. They are busy—objects pile up and figures merge with their environment. She works in impasto, using thick, textured brushstrokes that emphasise the painting process rather than illusion.
Christine later studied art at the University of Canterbury and became a sculptor in Auckland. Often, Fahey’s subjects gaze directly at the viewer, suggesting influence from works like Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Like Manet's barmaid, Christine may appear more innocent, but the connection to the burdens of domesticity and the false glamour of the demi-monde is clear.
Christine in the Pantry featured in the seminal exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Los Angeles in 2007, curated by Connie Butler. The first major institutional survey of feminist-influenced art, it included around 120 artists from 21 countries. The exhibition travelled to Washington, New York, and Vancouver. The catalogue described Fahey as a standout for her engagement with social and political issues, unlike many of her generation who favoured landscape or abstraction.
Fahey explores women’s experiences and identity through figurative art. She described the home as "the battlefield of the psyche" and likened it to a stage where emotional dramas play out. Her genius lies in elevating everyday domestic scenes into mythic and historic grandeur. The feminine sphere becomes as epic as Achilles or Alexander the Great. Here, the poem Epic by Patrick Kavanagh comes to mind, where local events are imbued with mythic weight.
This leads us to Sisters Communing II (1990), a sequel to the earlier 1974 painting Sisters Communing, held by the Hocken Library. The earlier work shows two women relaxing with wine and cigarettes, a child nearby. In the sequel, the child is gone and the women are more sophisticated—perhaps dining out, dwarfed by a giant, triffid-like fern. Though she often depicts food and domestic tables, Fahey disliked housework and lacked cooking skills, yet portrays the 1980s' bourgeois food culture with uncanny accuracy.
The food in Sisters Communing II is collaged from magazines, and the top-down view required perspective distortion. Like Picasso, Fahey presents multiple viewpoints at once. The two sisters converse amid baroque gestures, theatrical flourishes, and costumey clothes. Their marble-like skin recalls Bronzino’s mannerist elegance. There are echoes of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam—a consoling yet possibly condescending gesture, perhaps referencing pre-Raphaelite Evelyn de Morgan’s witches.
One sister shows despair, in a pose recalling Dürer’s Melancholia and the emotional intensity of Fuseli’s romantic figures. Fahey heightens relatable, even trivial moments to Greek-tragedy proportions—as in My Skirts in Your Effing Room (1979), which includes symbolic items: her QEII travel grant letter, Buller's Birds of New Zealand, and Famous Women Artists: 1550–1950.
The accusatory raised skirt takes on the drama of David’s Oath of the Horatii or even Perseus brandishing Medusa’s head. Fahey’s homage to Manet continues with Luncheon on the Grass (1981–1982), full of Kiwiana and parody. Manet’s scandal lay in dressing nude women as modern figures. Fahey flips this: here, the nude is male. She subverts the male gaze and places women’s experiences at the centre of the canvas.
Traditionally figurative yet utterly unconventional, Jacqueline Fahey is a truly extraordinary artist. Thank you.