Dr Cherie Driver

Overview

Dr Chérie Driver trained as a painter at Ulster and a Social Anthropologist at Queens University Belfast before completing her PhD on the ‘The writings of Griselda Pollock, Ireland, the ‘feminine’ and visual representation’ at Ulster in 2005. Before this in the mid 1990s, she worked for the Irish Wheelchair Association facilitating creative arts practices with vulnerable adults and as an event’s organiser for the African Cultural Project in Dublin promoting African culture across the island of Ireland.

As a researcher from 2005, she has worked on several collaborative research projects in ‘art and its locations’ and specializing in art in contested spaces and art and documentation, including the DSD funded project ‘ON THE GROUND Growing Public Art in West Belfast and Greater Shankill A STRATEGY FOR ENGAGEMENT 2007’. Appointed Lecturer in Art Theory in 2010 Chérie taught in, and was course director of the BA (Hons) Fine Art before being appointed as Associate Head of Belfast School of Art in 2021 where she also supervises PhD Research Projects within the Research Institute of Art & Design.

Chérie’s artistic and research interests concern the rebuilding, restoration and preserving of contemporary visual art archives in Northern Ireland and the creative and theoretical exploration of materiality and subjectivity in the expanded field of painting.

She curated the Catalyst Arts: Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art X which was the tenth instalment of Golden Thread Gallery’s Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art Series, a project that forms a significant archive of Northern Irish Art from 1945 to the present. The exhibition centred on the artist led initiative established in 1992. She continues to lead on the restoration and preservation of several Archive Projects in Northern Ireland to preserve contemporary research and practices since the 1970s for the future.

She wrote the essay ‘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. She is co-editor (With Dr Sandra Johnston and Dr Paula Blair) on the book Actional Poetics – ASH SHE HE: The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan, 1971-2020 (published September 2021 by Intellect Press.