GUA Alumni: Eileen Fair
Regional Winner in Visual Arts Category in 2024.
June 24, 2026
Eileen Fair
Eileen Fair was our 2024 Regional Winner for the Island of Ireland in the Visual Arts Category.
Her winning Ethereal Playground submission can be viewed in our library.
After spending most of her working life in the insurance industry and as a family carer, she returned to full-time education in her early 50’s, graduating in Contemporary Art (Honours) – 3D Practice and earning the Atlantic Technological University’s Academic Excellence Award in 2023.
In the three years since graduating and receiving her GUA Award, Eileen has exhibited widely with her work being longlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards and the RDS Craft Awards. She received a Design and Crafts Council of Ireland (DCCI) Future Makers – Materials Award in 2023 and an Age & Opportunity/Bealtaine Arts Festival – Emerging Artist Award in 2025.
Activism has become an essential part of Eileen’s multidisciplinary mixed-media arts practice, where she recognises her ability to use her voice for change through artistic expression. Empathy for under-supported or unresolved social injustices has prompted her creation of two ongoing art collections:
Through the Eye of a Needle addresses her experience of diminishing sight, dealing directly with stigma towards disability, while Ethereal Playground challenges the unsettling legacy of Irish mother and baby homes and other historic institutions.
Through the Eye of a Needle addresses her experience of diminishing sight, dealing directly with stigma towards disability, while Ethereal Playground challenges the unsettling legacy of Irish mother and baby homes and other historic institutions.
As an introduction to sculpture, Eileen taught maquette-making to adults with intellectual disabilities. She was invited back to ATU as a guest lecturer, where her academic research journals were shared by lecturers in the campus library, for students to appreciate high standards of professional practice.
Environmental concerns prompt her use of every conceivable form of found object in her drawings, textiles, paintings and installations, some of which are tactile or kinetic. Through collecting multiple byproducts and by repurposing waste materials, she deliberately works more sustainably by reducing the need to purchase raw materials.
Materiality matters, especially when juxtaposing rudimentary materials and reimagined found objects, resulting in poignant subverted structures loaded with narrative, more beautiful and more profound in their second life.
Her interests are diverse and her disparate creations are not limited to 3D formats. She also produces a variety of 2D and photographic studies. Much of her work is inspired by and drawn from nature, particularly through botanical and scientific illustrations.
Her third and most recent ongoing collection, Flights of Fancy, revolves around the rituals of making; creating blind drawings with animal bones and making hybrid creatures from animal carcasses, she returns them to nature ‘in spirit’ as reimagined life forms. She is currently developing veneration of all life-forms and giving them absolute freedom on carousel rides and other intriguing outcomes.
Eileen has just been nominated for an Honorary Knighthood (Dame) in The Order of Prometheus by (Duke) Dr. Thomas Maes, a Diplomat Consul from World of Crete, in recognition of artistic integrity and societal impact. This honour is only bestowed annually to a maximum of five international recipients who have demonstrated outstanding accomplishments across the arts, business, science, leadership, education, innovation and humanitarian service. Members of the Order will meet once annually to determine which humanitarian cause they will support in their respective regions.
