Cherie Driver

I am a Lecturer in Art Theory and am current the Deputy Head of School at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. Originally from Co. Wicklow, I have lived and worked in Northern Ireland for almost three 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 (First Class) (Ulster University, 2000); an MA in Social Anthropology (QUB, 2001); a PhD in Feminist Art Theory (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 (TUS, 2024–2026). My research explores feminine subjectivity, landscape, embodiment, and the unconscious, with particular attention to excess, the uncanny, and the abject as they emerge through material painting practice.

My creative practice engages critically with the traditions of landscape painting and abstraction, producing visceral inner-body landscapes that materialise dream imagery, sensation, and psychic intensity through oil, mixed media and encaustic processes. Drawing on post-Jungian and feminist psychoanalytic frameworks, the work operates as sites where bodily memory, imagination, and symbolic excess surface beyond language. Dreams, somatic experience, automatic drawing, and imaginal processes form key methodological tools within my practice and research.

These concerns extend into my writing, curatorial practice, and research-led pedagogy. In the essay Penumbra: Painting Materialising in the Almost-Shadow (2020), written for the F. E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio, I address the visibility of women’s painting practices in Ireland through feminist and psychoanalytic aesthetics. I have also contributed to contemporary art documentation and archiving in Northern Ireland, including Catalyst Arts: Collective Histories and Actional Poetics – ASH SHE HE: The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan.

I am currently engaged in collaborative research and curriculum development with the MAC Belfast, including the design of the international summer module Creative Practices for Peacebuilding: Belfast (New York University / MAC Belfast), due to recruit in 2026. In recent academic papers I have been presented in New York and Oxford, I have focused both on the role of art in peacebuilding and on depth-psychological approaches to art practice, trauma, feminine archetypes, and creative imagination in post-conflict and cultural contexts.

My current research sits at the intersection of contemporary painting, Jungian and post-Jungian thought, feminist theory, and socially engaged, depth-informed creative practice. I have membership of the International Association for Jungian Studies.