PROVENANCE Private Collection, Auckland

EXHIBITED Jackie Fahey Paintings, Barry Lett Galleries, 28 May - 8 June, 1979 Anxious Images, Aspects of New Zealand Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1984 Exhibited as Drawing Room Scene with Grandma, Emily and Birds Original label affixed verso

ILLUSTRATED p. 26 Anxious Images, Aspects of New Zealand Art, Auckland City Art Gallery publication, 1984

The open school lunch box at the centre of this composition gives the work its title, but its vibrant yellow is also a point of focus which links key elements of the composition together. It is a colour picked up in the roll - necked sweater worn by the artist's younger daughter Emily, the lunchbox's owner, who sits on a the red velvet seat of the Victorian chair on the right. Opposite Emily is Margaret, the artist's elderly mother, who, having had a fall was briefly living with her daughter Jacqueline's family in one of the Carrington Hospital doctors' houses. Freshly picked bright yellow daffodils, perhaps grown from bulbs in the grounds of the psychiatric hospital where Jacqueline's husband Dr Fraser McDonald was Medical Superintendent, sit on the table at Margaret's elbow. Rather than a traditional still life on the tabletop, Fahey has juxtaposed the packed school lunch with a green pepper, orange and nectarine, elements which enliven the composition with shape and gloss. Although it is spring time, the electric heater is glowing orange in the hearth, placed in front of the ornate Royal Doulton ceramic tiles which decorate the Victorian fireplace with tones of yellow, blue and green. In this way, the artist creates a diamond shape of yellow highlights to link her pictorial elements.

Both Margaret and Emily hold birds on stands in their hands, seagulls which have been taxidermied in attitudes of swooping flight. The birds were on loan at the time to the artist to assist with imagery to feature in her large anti-war painting The Hill of Bitter Memories completed in 1982, now in the collection of the Wallace Arts Trust. Emily is dismayed that the birds have died, and her face is cast down, while Margaret looks up at us, gesturing the bird she holds in her left hand, as if to show us that this is how a real bird might fly. Grandmother and granddaughter, young and old, bookend the trajectory of female life, while the European owl sits on a perch in the foreground, gazing out at the viewer with large, golden eyes, symbolising wisdom. The patterning of the blue Turkish carpet which stretches out across the floor vies for attention with the floral pattern of Emily's frock, and the white print on Margaret's more sedate dress. Behind, the vertical stripes of wallpaper in the background close off recession. Typically for Fahey's works from the 1970s, this painting has been inspired by the artist's domestic life, when caregiving responsibilities and art competed for her attention on a daily basis.

Jacqueline Fahey studied painting at Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch, where she was taught by Cecil Kelly, Russell Clark, Bill Sutton and Colin Lovell-Smith, completing a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1952. Marrying, and having three daughters temporarily slowed her exhibiting career but her distinctive feminist perspective was apparent in her earliest works. Awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting in 1997, a decade later her works Christine in the Pantry (1972) and Sisters Communing (1974) were selected for the major exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In 2013, she received an Arts Foundation Icon Award, an honour reserved to 20 living NZ artists, and her work from the 1970s was the subject of a book and exhibition titled Say Something! at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2019, organised to coincide with the 125th anniversary of women's suffrage in New Zealand.

LINDA TYLER