Jacqueline Fahey has blessed us with her mahi for more than seven decades. As one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prestigious artists, she has devoted her life to painting the world immediately around her. The oil paintings discussed in this essay range from as early as the eerie Cancer Ward (1957) to Juxtaposition (2025), a work Fahey considers among the most important in her recent survey exhibition at Gow Langsford Onehunga, Protest Paintings.

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit many major shows dedicated to artists at different stages of their careers: Cecily Brown, Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Chicago, Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold and David Hockney. Yet I had never encountered one that gathered together 70 years of painting until now. Over several bodies of work from the 1950s through the 2000s, the exhibition’s 21 paintings highlight and scrutinise various facets of Fahey’s mind: problems both personal and global, reconstructed memories, intimate negotiations and significant moments revived on canvas through deceptive, often subliminal forms.

Expansive landscapes and compressed domestic interiors go hand-in-hand with Fahey’s extraordinary command of colour, and enlarge the significance of whatever is—or once was—most proximate to her. Put simply, the raw essence of Fahey’s output has always been her own life, which, perhaps inevitably, has proved anything but simple.

I decided that rather than getting away from it all, I would embrace domesticity, transform it, interpret it. Who better than someone immersed in it? I did not want to escape from my family, I loved them. I began to understand that what happened in my kitchen was as momentous to me as what had happened in Queen Elizabeth’s banquet hall. Everything that made up my life automatically became part of my work. —Jacqueline Fahey.^[01]

Before I was introduced to Fahey’s work, or even to the fact she was such a national treasure, I was only ever aware of her as the grandmother of my best friend Demeter. She was way more chic than my own, and lived in an amazingly colourful house that looked like the magical dragon-inspired playground at the Auckland Zoo… talk about urban neurosis.

In Tragedy outside the dairy II (2003), Demeter, probably no older than 11 here, clambers atop a classic Tip Top ice cream sign on a sunlit Williamson Avenue, just beside the park. She wears the pink-sleeved red top I always remember being jealous of (mostly because my breasts came in earlier than hers). Lost in the carefree swings of childhood, she remains entirely oblivious to a pedestrian bleeding out on the pavement, despite the frantic commotion of onlookers surrounding him. Whether struck moments earlier by the helmeted figure nearby or not, the man’s lifeless body fractures the familiarity of an otherwise peaceful street in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Visiting Alex McDonald recently, Fahey’s middle daughter and Demeter’s mother, we found ourselves talking at length about this specific work. “That’s Hebrew written on the back of his shirt, Alex,” I said, pointing to the painting’s far-left figure. Although I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I could make out individual brushstrokes forming letters from the aleph-bet, and knew it wasn’t any other language. “Really? I’d never noticed that,” she replied. “But it makes sense, because around this time mum was really moving from the interior—from the domestic to the outside—and this particular series of paintings was inspired by a famous photograph of a father trying to protect his little boy from I.D.F. gunfire.”

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Before analysing any of Fahey’s paintings, and tying my own adjacent life to her family throughout, it is absolutely, non-negotiably important to first address the genocidal atrocities unfolding in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The responsibility lies with the Israeli Government and military, under the leadership of known terrorist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his coalition in the Knesset, specifically National Security Minister and shameless Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Finance Minister and psychopath Bezalel Smotrich, whose extremist rhetoric and policies have drawn widespread international condemnation, and resulted in the loss of thousands of innocent lives. In her eloquently written speech, delivered by McDonald at the opening of her exhibition, Fahey, as per, put it best: My Gaza paintings have been the victim of this deliberate misinterpretation. We all know that, with its rapidly shrinking borders, Gaza is a slaughterhouse. A nightmare of genocide, but the mainstream press somehow suggests that it’s not something ‘nice people’ talk about. They say it’s complicated, but there is nothing complicated about genocide. Dying from festering wounds and starvation in gross squalor isn’t complicated. It’s a human-created nightmare, which, tragically it would seem, we are not going to wake up from anytime soon. —Jacqueline Fahey.

It is painful to acknowledge that during the ongoing genocide that began in 2023, Jamal al-Durrah has since lost 11 relatives, including another of his sons, Ahmed al-Durrah.

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“I think what Mum was trying to do was reinforce these types of international tragedies into a New Zealand setting, and recast them. As if to confront her audience, or ask: If this happened right in front of you—in a place like Westmere, Ponsonby or Point Chevalier—would you finally wake up?”

“Do you think what she was trying to do was lost on her viewers?” I asked Alex.

“Entirely,” she replied, as she flipped through the exhibition catalogue before landing on an image of her mother’s most recent painting, Juxtaposition. Her finger settled on its central figure: an untethered woman sitting with her back towards a television broadcasting Al Jazeera coverage from Gaza. Journalists stumble through clouds of dust as buildings collapse around them. Bodies lie strewn across the screen, displaced, broken, with little hope even in their sparing.

If only someone would turn the fuck around to SEE them!

But why would she?

Succulent fruits, fish and vegetables scatterdance across a dining-room table, readily available to feast on for a nation of one, maybe two lucky people at most—no soldiers hoarding aid here. What’s there to worry about other than Alvininius Caesar the cat potentially spotting a window-sill-squatting tūī? A Palestinian flag accidentally slipping into a soil-ridden garden? The Persian carpet smelling like onions in the morning?

As first world and hell on earth collide, screams from the longest-displaced refugee population become almost audible. “Death, death, death pursues us,” the painting cries out in their honour, while simultaneously exposing the seductive ease of looking away from the opposite side of the world—from the artist’s very own living room, to be exact. With her highly strung method of painting, unwavering conviction and unmistakable “say what you mean, mean what you say” attitude, Fahey somehow contains all of these paradoxes within a single frame. She names the country responsible without an inch of a flinch, as flailing pink bodies tumble across the canvas, miniature and doomed, clinging to the day’s headlines by little more than a bloodied thread.

In Juxtaposition, looking away becomes a conscious choice—for her central figure, for Fahey herself, and ultimately for us as audience. What does it mean to know that something monstrous is happening and continue eating dinner? How much suffering can be transmitted into a comfortable room before its inhabitants become incapable of seeing it? Fahey has no interest in holding our hand through these hard questions. She paints the contradiction, then leaves us to reckon with it ourselves.

Throughout her career, Fahey has remained fiercely committed to the devices she’s established in her home studio with none other than her brushes, paints, canvas and cat. Alongside her movement from interior to exterior space, she increasingly embraces social and political tensions, utterly unafraid to rock the boat. Asked recently how she continues to hold onto hope during these extraordinary times, Fahey’s answer was devastatingly concise: Hope? I fear Voltaire’s bridge over the abyss is already beyond repair.^[02]

Who cares?

“Jacqueline Fahey does!” her paintings chant back.

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This essay is dedicated to Demeter. The moment my life was unexpectedly turned upside down, you were the first person ready to catch me. I love you.

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Much has been written about Fahey as a feminist artist, appropriately so. But Protest Paintings also demonstrated how limiting such a designation can become once it hardens into an interpretive shortcut. Fahey does not simply paint women. She paints systems. Marriage, motherhood, Catholicism, domestic labour, psychiatric medicine, sexuality, class and artistic ambition repeatedly enter the same frame because they have entered the same life and lives. Her feminism operates structurally, historically, by default of the woman she was and is today. A kitchen need not contain a slogan to be political; it need only to reveal who is cooking, who is cleaning, who has time to think, who has time to paint, and who has been taught to consider those arrangements ‘natural’.

When I use the term ‘feminist artist’ I mean I am a woman (and that helps) but by marrying, having children and being confined by that experience I am leading the life most women lead. I would even after that not call myself a feminist artist if I did not use that experience and physical world as the material to comment politically on that special way of spending one’s life. —Jacqueline Fahey.^[03]

McDonald remembers her mother consciously recognising that she could not simultaneously be a conventional housewife and a painter. Fahey cooked dinner each night, but much of the cleaning fell elsewhere. She painted intensely in the mornings, stopped for lunch, exercised, slept, returned to family life, and sometimes painted again after dinner. Her studio has always been at home and, boy, was there a lot of gin!

In Last Summer (1971), paint is physically, richly abundant. Satisfyingly heavy deposits of pigment build people—here her husband, Dr Fraser McDonald, and middle daughter Alex—clothing, flowers and household objects into a surface allergic to the notion that domestic painting is somehow minor. Clothing can be traced to actual purchases; objects to hospital gala days; flowers to Mr Speedy, a former psychiatric patient and gardener who became deeply woven into the family’s life. As Judy Darragh observes, Fahey’s paintings remain rooted “across the kitchen table… [sharing] all those sorts of stories that often get diminished.”

Rather than treating domestic life as painting’s limit, Fahey reveals it to be one of its richest political and psychological spheres. A ʻfemale claustrophobia’ is often cited as characteristic of Fahey’s domestic scenes, but I see something slightly different: the explosion of an extraordinarily occupied mind. Memories, anxieties, arguments, symbols and attentive observations leak across these canvases, driven by an urgent psychological need to purge the debris of everyday life.

To stand before a Fahey painting and recognise a person whose life extends far beyond its frame is to simultaneously experience several incompatible forms of time. It is also both a privilege and a curse, much like my friendship with Demeter in many ways. Knowing full well what my best friend looks like decades after Tragedy outside the dairy II, her mother can also look at paintings from the 1970s and identify the clothes, people, dogs, furniture and social rituals that formed her very own childhood—My Skirt’s in Your Fucking Room! (1979) being one striking example. She can remember sitting for her mother, sometimes modelling for hours, without recalling that consent was ever especially negotiable.

Protest Paintings occupied an unstable position between art-historical document and family album. I want to use ‘diaristic’, but it’s not quite the right word. Diaries are usually written after something has happened, while Fahey’s paintings often feel as though the happening, remembering, judging and revising occur all at once. Painted language enters the compositions of works like K Rd and Why are you doing this? (both 1998), while perspectives jar against one another in larger works like Luncheon on the Grass(1981–82), and later The Oldest Profession (2017–19). Disjunctive temporalities coexist in her powerful triptych Whatever Happened to Bernadette Devlin? (1998), and more poignantly so in works like In My Studio (2021).

Fahey’s 2008–9 paintings refuse any reassurance of coherent reminiscence whatsoever. Corgis, hydrangeas, psychiatric patients, lovers, Marx, nuns and Greek gods occupy the same psychic real estate. These works return to the years Fahey and her young family lived on the grounds of Porirua Hospital, where her husband, Dr Fraser McDonald, worked as a pioneering psychiatrist. In her second memoir, Before I Forget (2012), Fahey imagines attempting to address her younger self: My young, hormone-driven self can’t hear me, doesn’t want to hear me… I don’t know who this woman who once was me is. —Jacqueline Fahey.

Her admission lies at the heart of paintings such as Encounter with the Past (2008) and That is life (2009), in which she tests not so much her own memory, but what happens when it begins to recede.

In The Passion Flower (2009), lime, lemon and lilac blooms burst against a field of indecently electric, acid-green grass. Two corgis gnaw the meat off a bone, momentarily resembling foxes, but also the spaghetti-sharing lovers of Lady and the Tramp. To the left, a couple reclines across a stretch of blue velvet, surrendering to a sunlit, post-coital snooze. For another couple in the centre of the work, something has shifted, and a different side to the ‘hormonal delusions of love’ shows two fertile creatures curdled into hesitation. The woman seems withdrawn and apprehensive, while her hopeful partner remains suspended in confusion.

Across one canine and two human couples, as well as Fahey’s shouty seventh-wheel stance, everything here feels very right and very wrong… effervescent and tragic, if you will. From what little I know, however pathetically acquired thus far, the same contradiction feels remarkably true of love.

Painted scripts wind through the composition before a speech bubble delivers Fahey’s wonderfully self-deflating “I can hardly remember what I was on about.” Rather than signalling failure, Fahey’s forgetfulness becomes the painting’s organising principle. Memory is not recovered intact. It is reconstructed until certainty itself becomes impossible, or, more importantly, until nobody remembers enough to argue otherwise.

Her husband’s psychiatric career took the family between some of Aotearoa’s largest psychiatric institutions, including Carrington and Kingseat. Their grounds, gardens and patients continue to recur throughout Fahey’s paintings long after the institutions themselves have transformed. Today, Kingseat is perhaps better known as the site of Spookers, an unsettling scare-house attraction that obscures some of the same histories that continue to haunt Fahey’s paintings and, consequently, the nation’s collective memory of a medical past that some would rather bury and others remain determined to unearth.

Fahey associates hydrangeas with psychiatric institutions, while her diminutive, Quasimodo-esque figures, derived from Bosch and Bruegel, represent many of the patients she saw on the daily. I remarked to Alex jokingly that, before recognising their European precedents, I had initially viewed these characters as something closer to Murray Ball’s Footrot Flats comics. Inviting a liquorice allsorts of cultural slippages, Fahey’s paintings delightfully juxtapose canonical European art history alongside the visual vernacular of growing up as a Kiwi. Once criticised for painting grass “too green”, her response was uncomplicated: “People simply weren’t looking at what was right in front of them.” It may be the simplest key to her entire practice: look again. Grass, at least here in Aotearoa, really IS that green.

By 16, Demeter and I were a car crash waiting to happen. A tragedy outside every dairy, porn shop, pawn shop and video rental store (R.I.P. The Source). We managed to get into serious trouble at almost every school we attended together, though at the time it never really felt wrong, and in many ways still doesn’t. Sister Priscilla would reprimand us for daring to roll our skirts an inch too high, while we somehow developed a sharp-witted ability to ruffle the feathers of every teacher that dared enter our orbit. For years we were each other’s muses, feeding one another’s recklessness until it became unsustainable. After one particularly memorable episode—she suspended, I expelled—not only was I sent to finish my studies at Horowhenua College, but forced to live with my grandmother. At that point, I would’ve killed to be living with Demeter’s instead. Not to state the obvious, but Fahey has always been infinitely cooler than either of us, despite our consistent efforts. Her contempt for authority started early… around the same time she got kicked out of her Timaru kindergarten.

A mentor of mine once suggested that a painting’s greatness could be measured by one’s own resistance to it. “See whether your body instinctively moves towards it, recoils from it, or becomes suspended somewhere between the two,” he told me years ago, words that have remained with me ever since. By that personally adopted measure, Fahey’s The car as the erotic machine in the domain, or sacred and profane love (1981–82) was, by far, the most resistant painting in her exhibition.

Painted shortly after Fahey’s transformative period in New York, the enormous composition abandons any expectation of stable pictorial space. Lovers in parked cars, magpies, children, Adonis and Aphrodite splatter themselves across the terrain of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s prized Pukekawa Auckland Domain, under an epic, euphoric sky. Red and gold glitter speckle like pōhutukawa pollen or fairy dust, and according to Anna Jackson’s catalogue text, stand in for the herpes virus—a potent reminder of what was once described as the punishment for free love.

The painting presents marital relationships as compartmentalised, though never successfully separate. Desire contaminates marriage just as much as domestic obligation intrudes upon erotic freedom. Danger enters pleasure, something way sexier when it’s off limits—as long as the car is firmly parked.

McDonald remembers her older sister, Augusta, experimenting with glitter during the punk years, when unconventional and theatrical materials entered her crafty vocabulary. Fahey may well have adopted the material from her eldest daughter, but definitely exploited its associations with preciousness, spectacle and regality on her own.

For better, and certainly not worse, I cannot consider glitter without thinking of Reuben Paterson. Fahey had been Paterson’s tutor at Elam, arriving at studio critiques with her border collie and offering what he remembers as “some of the most exquisite challenges and interactions I have ever had with an artist.” Paterson read Fahey’s use of glitter through another history, and told me that when the painting was made, consensual sex between men remained criminalised in Aotearoa. The Homosexual Law Reform Act would not arrive until 1986, making Pukekawa Auckland Domain far more than a mere secret setting for heterosexual lovers.

Having admired Paterson’s work for many years, the more I experience it—whether in Tribeca or on Karangahape Road—the more impossible it becomes to reduce one of his favourite materials to mere ornament, decoration, or any other dated, dusty term. For Paterson, Pukekawa Auckland Domain was a place where queer men could encounter one another within its shadows. Looking at Fahey’s painting, he recognised glitter as a material that, in its refusal to be contained, started to symbolise continual survival in and of itself.

If queendom is honoured by glitter, then in some ways we were the glitter of that park. We were forced into its shadows and into places where we could exist, but glitter doesn’t stay where it’s put. It moves, it transfers, it catches the light and it’s almost impossible to completely clear away. We’ve had to learn how to behave like glitter: to move, to gather, to catch the light, and, above all, to remain. —Reuben Paterson.

Twenty-five years after Fahey painted The car as the erotic machine, or sacred and profane love, Demeter and I would wander through that same dimly lit park ourselves, its mysterious darkness punctuated merely by the interior glow of dodgily parked cars, and the very first joint we smoked together.

Fahey captured one history of Pukekawa Auckland Domain, while the landscape itself continues to accumulate countless others. Across generations, its shadows have harboured queer encounters, art students and, eventually, two idiotic teenagers getting stoned, each negotiating different versions of risk, burning desire, and the strained relationship between the two.

In Cancer Ward, painted when Fahey was only 28 years old, a gaunt woman waits in the desolate coldness of a hospital environment. McDonald recalls the story of her mother discovering a patient apparently left alone to die, disturbed enough by this to paint her. Starkly removed from the chromatic excess that would later define Fahey’s paintings, the work reminded me of Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–4). Sickly hues shared by both artists make for a chillingly obvious comparison, but more interesting is the proximity of death to their making. By 19, Picasso had lost his seven-year-old sister Conchita to diphtheria and witnessed suicide enter his Barcelona circle through the death of Catalan painter Hortensi Güell, who threw himself off a cliff. He was also well aware of Vincent van Gogh’s suicide a decade earlier. Most consequentially, his close friend, the Spanish poet and painter Carles Casagemas, shot himself at a dinner party in Paris. It was his death that became the immediate catalyst for a succession of canvases saturated in washes of cadaverous blues: among the first, Casagemas dans cercueil (Casagemas in His Coffin) (1901).

Sixty-nine years after Cancer Ward was painted, a woman in Juxtaposition sits comfortably while other people die on television behind her, making the symmetry in Protest Paintings nothing short of brutal. Between those two acts of seeing—or not seeing—lies an entire career. Perhaps this is why ʻprotest’ remains such apt terminology. Untethered from banners, marches, ideology or explicit political content, Fahey’s relentless protest begins and ends at home, at the level of her immediate attention. Her pictures are neither morally complicated, nor particularly interested in making their maker appear virtuous. They can be funny, vindictive, tender, erotic, neurotic and furious, yet they never sugar-coat the complexities of her world.

Fahey has spent decades painting what other people choose not to see: things that are right in front of them. A woman dying alone; a psychiatric patient who becomes a beloved family gardener; an unequal domestic bargain; the layered histories of a public park; a child beneath gunfire; a television broadcasting dead bodies into a room overflowing with food. There is also a lot that she has done for which I remain personally grateful. Fahey’s paintings have shown me additional dimensions of people I already loved. They contain versions of them that existed before I did, alongside clothes and gestures I recognise, streets on which I have walked, cried and kissed, and places that continue to accumulate lives none of us can ever completely recover, nor ever comprehend.

Fahey has always refused the comforting fiction that the things immediately surrounding us are too ordinary, too private, too uncomfortable, too vulgar, too distant or too politically inconvenient to deserve sustained attention. She enlarges the moral significance of whatever is closest at hand until the very familiarity of it makes looking away almost impossible. This is what her paintings ultimately protest against: not simply genocide, war, patriarchy, institutional violence or political indifference, but the gradual erosion of our capacity to care enough to resist them. Complacency becomes complicity, and the conditions we once found intolerable become the environment we learn to live within. Fascism does not require our agreement; our indifference will fuel it just fine.

Fahey reminds us that paying attention is in itself an ethical, moral and political act; that every history is first lived by ordinary people; and that no life is ever too small to become the subject of a serious, or not-so-serious, painting.