In Fahey’s most recent work she turns to her recurring thematic entanglements, creating an image of protest that is firmly placed within a domestic interior. In Juxtaposition (2025) Fahey pictures an anonymous couple seated at an abundant table, replete with oysters, seafood and a bounty of fresh produce, depicted with her trademark joie de vivre. A man’s hand extends into the lower corner of the painting, while a smiling woman appears to be engaged in animated conversation between sips from her wine glass. Compressed into the painting’s right hand side, a television broadcasts the horrors of contemporary colonial violence into the home. Text and imagery refer to recent atrocities, which the woman, with her back turned to the television, seems easily able to ignore.

This anonymous woman is perhaps the antithesis of Fahey, capable of ignoring the systemic issues of oppression which she believe neither concern nor implicate her. Fahey, on the other hand, has always known that the domestic interior is not an inconsequential or netural site – the home does not exist in isolation from the political realities of the world. Her paintings have always been protest paintings.

Text by Kirsty Baker