Artist Profile

Joelene McAllister is a Belfast-based visual artist working across portraiture, drawing, painting, and ceramics. She completed an MFA in Fine Art with Distinction at Ulster University in 2026, following a First Class BA in Fine Art. Her practice explores perception, recognition, and the instability of interpretation, questioning how we construct meaning from what we see. Through repetition, layering, erasure, and material transformation, McAllister repeatedly alters familiar human forms, allowing figures to emerge and recede between clarity and ambiguity, presence and absence. Erasure becomes a generative process rather than a correction, preserving traces of earlier decisions and exposing the evolution of the image. Rather than seeking fixed likeness or identity, her work uses portraiture to examine the uncertainty of seeing and the tension between our instinct to recognise and categorise and the complexity that resists definitive interpretation.