AUCKLAND CITY COUNCIL

MEDIA RELEASE

9 June 2006

Something for the birds: a life lived to the full

Auckland City Libraries invites you to meet Jacqueline Fahey, who will be talking about her new book “Something for the Birds” – part memoir, part family history – on 21 June at the Central City Library.

“Something for the Birds” is a lively, amusing, sad and utterly readable collection of family and personal stories interwoven with an astute social and cultural commentary on New Zealand society by the well-known artist and Auckland personality, Jacqueline Fahey. Her book offers stories from her family history, her childhood in Timaru, her student life as a bohemian artist and her marriage to pre-eminent psychiatrist Fraser McDonald. “Something for the Birds” is an absorbing memoir of a life lived to the full.

“My interest was in the fate of women, how domestic circumstances dictated their lives. How men and women might start out together with the best of intentions but that the system would divide them. It was also clear from what male artists had to say that, if I wanted to be an artist, I would also have to be a fighter: hence Artist as Warrior. Some things were beginning to dawn on me.” Extract from “Something for the Birds”.

As a distinguished painter whose career started in the 1950s, Jacqueline painted from a woman’s point of view, depicting in her paintings the domestic and isolated lives of suburban women of the time. During her career, she has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and her work has been selected for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 2007 exhibition ‘100 Feminist Painters’.

Details are:

Date: Wednesday 21 June

Time: 6pm

Location: Whare Wananga, 2nd Floor, Central City Library 44-46 Lorne St CBD

Bookings: Call 09 377 0209.

For more information check out our website www.aucklandcitylibraries.com.

ENDS

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