Associate Head of Belfast School of Art
Dr Cherie Driver
Associate Head of Belfast School of Art
I am originally from Co. Wicklow and now living and working in Northern Ireland for almost 3 decades. I position myself as an artist-educator whose praxis is rooted in Jungian depth psychology, philosophical alchemy, and the creative imagination as primary modes of inquiry, reflection, and expression.
I hold a HDip in Art (WRTC, 1995); a BA (Hons) in Fine Art with First Class Honours (Ulster University, 2000); an MA in Social Anthropology (Queen’s University Belfast, 2001); a PhD in Fine Art (Ulster University, 2005); and a PG Cert in Higher Education Practice (Ulster University, 2012). I am currently undertaking an MA in Art, Psyche and the Creative Imagination at Limerick School of Art and Design (2024–2026).
As an artist I have produced works, that are evocative of the traditional genre of landscape painting yet incorporate elements and interventions that resonate with a deeper inner landscape of the female body, sensation, feminine jouissance, the uncanny and the abject. The paintings materialise the excess of the inner feminine psyche. These inner body landscapes utilise a fleshy and earthy palette of oil and encaustic material to create images that draw on dialogues with landscape painting and abstraction to materially express spaces that linger between the land and the inner psyche of spaces that are known, strange, more than signification and the abject. Encountered as marks and gestures, a negotiation of the work is to bring one in proximity to death, the animal and the Lacanian real routed in excess in the psyche. I explore these inner landscapes through dreams and images that come into awareness through bodily experiences, daydreams, imaginations and automatic drawings.
I have been deeply drawn to the debates and discourses that have negotiated the significant tie between painting and subject theory. In this terrain the canvas and its encounter of mark, gesture and brushstroke has become a location at which the viewer meets and mediates an encounter between themselves as subject and collective experience. The task is to explore female subjectivity in the materiality of painting, as a site for mediation and negotiation; to glimpse or encounter an excess of feminine desire, playfulness and the disruption of language and patriarchal social order.
These concerns also inform my teaching, curation, mentoring and in writing essays such as ‘Penumbra: Painting Materialising in the Almost-Shadow’ for the F. E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio exhibition Penumbra, (2020) curated by Dr Louise Wallace and Dr Riann Coulter. The exhibition Penumbra can be understood in relational distance to a matrix of exhibitions of works by contemporary female artists from across the island of Ireland. These exhibitions and the essay that accompanied it, had sought to address the invisibility of such work.
My career has also involved significant engagement with contemporary art documentation and archiving, including my notable contributions to preserving Northern Ireland's visual art heritage. I have played a key role in exhibitions like Catalyst Arts: Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art X, which archives art movements from 1945 onward. Additionally, I have coauthored Actional Poetics – ASH SHE HE: The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan, 1971-2020, furthering my contribution on the discourse around performance and visual representation in Northern Irish art.
I am a Lecturer in Art Theory since 2010 and I am the Associate Head at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University since 2020. I currently locate myself professionally within contemporary fine art practice, critical art theory, creative education, and socially engaged, depth-informed research. I have developed curriculum within the School in research and writing in the visual arts for seminar groups on ‘Socially Engaged Art Practice’ and ‘Empathic Encounters: Trauma, Memory and Effect, the body and art’.
Recently I have written a summer module ‘Restorative Justice: Creative Practices in Peacebuilding’ for New York University in partnership with the MAC Belfast and this is due to recruit for Summer 2026. I offer mentoring and support to current and past graduates of the School, as well as open space technology facilitation sessions to help organisations and groups co-design forward plans of action around central issues, questions, or concerns.
My approach to my professional life has been re-positioned and consolidated in recent years through professional mentoring and training and deeply reflective practices that has given me a root grounded in authentic self and conscious leadership that is informed and amplified by the lens of Jungian depth psychology.
This deepening has not only repositioned my leadership practice but has also re-energized my creative and pedagogical voice with a renewed emphasis on authenticity, imagination, and psychological insight.
