“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 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 Elisabeth’s banquet hall. [ …] Everything that made up my life automatically became part of my work.”

Jacqueline Fahey, as quoted in "Lands and Deeds: Profiles of Contemporary New Zealand Painters", 1996

Jacqueline Fahey’s early embrace of the domestic sphere as a topic of artistic inquiry was a radical and unapologetic gesture within a male-dominated art world. Her insistence that the intimate realities of family life, domestic labour and the home were worthy subjects resonates with the feminist proposition that the personal is political.  Second wave feminists argued that experiences often dismissed as private or personal are shaped by wider structures of power and therefore demand collective and political attention. Fahey similarly transformed the domestic from a supposedly private realm into a site of artistic enquiry, making visible the complexities, tensions and relationships embedded within everyday life.

Domestic Topographies brings Fahey’s paintings into conversation with works by Claudia Kogachi, Georgie Nettell and Salome Tanuvasa. Across different generations and media, these artists turn towards the intimate: the home, the family, the body, domestic objects, memory and everyday routines. Their works suggest that the private sphere is never simply private, but a space in which gender, care, labour, identity, intimacy and power are continually negotiated. Rather than presenting a singular history of feminist art, the exhibition considers how artists across generations have transformed personal experience and domestic life into sites of artistic and political significance.

Image Credit: Georgie Nettell, installation view “Door Between Either And OR”, 2013. © Kunstverein München e.V., Photo: Ulrich Gebert.