Life as one of Ireland’s art directors is hectic, but Aoife Fealy is taking it in her stride. With a range from Hollywood productions to small Irish short films under her belt, Fealy is most creatively fulfilled when she is amplifying the voices of those who are silenced.

Fresh off last year’s win of the Discovery Award at the Dublin International Film Festival, Aoife Fealy has come a long way from her small town in Monaghan where, growing up as a queer person in Ireland, she learnt what it’s like to feel voiceless. As a result, creating diverse representation in Irish media directs her creative practices.

“There is a lack of diverse content out there, and to be involved in making even one tiny bit of media that might be outside the boundaries of what we’re used to is something I’m interested in,” Aoife Fealy said.

While it’s taken her a few years to find her place in the industry, she has settled into a nice balance of commercial work to pay the bills, and passion projects that feed her soul. After starting her creative journey in the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology studying Visual Arts Practice, she progressed into creating props, designing theatre sets, and finally finding her footing as an art director in Ireland’s thriving film and TV industry.

Growing up in rural conservative Monaghan in the 90s/00s meant Aoife Fealy had trouble fitting in. “It wasn’t really a place where people came out or were openly queer. I was always naturally introverted and felt slightly on the outskirts of social groupings while in school.”

It wasn’t until she went to college and got to know the queer community that she started thinking about her sexuality. “Once I started exploring that side of myself, and discovered other more diverse people, having a level of inclusivity in my life became very important”. This inclusivity translates into her working life.

 

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Her winter months are spent teaching at Dundalk Institute of Technology, alongside working on advertisements, jobs that are much more practical, but she still manages to find ways to be creative within them. She loves working with students, providing them with guidance through the industry, and being a gateway for them to thrive and succeed.

With advertising commercials, she can be her own boss and has control over her schedule. “Even though I have to answer to a client, with something small scale, I get more creative control because I’m the only one doing the design. I like doing commercials because they’re a little bit more hands-on creative-wise.”

Meanwhile, her summers are full of weeks-long shoots and being on set, usually in the role of standby art director for shows like Kin and Borderline, and most recently the movie Oddity. The standby art director acts as a go-between for the art production team and the physical set during shooting. The production designer will work with the director to come up with the look of the film, the set decorators decide how to bring that look to life (down to the individual objects) and the art director makes it all happen. Fealy then represents all those ideas on set and shapes what we see on screen. The job consists of long gruelling days and 60-hour weeks but the atmosphere and the people she gets to work with make it all worthwhile.

“The Irish film Extra-Ordinary was the best set I’ve ever worked with. It was so much fun, it was the first production I worked on where I really loved the script, it was exactly my wheelhouse: humour and horror.” Extra-Ordinary is an Irish horror comedy directed by Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman that was released in 2019, and you can find it on Netflix. The film centres around Rose Dooley, a reluctant psychic who can commune with the dead. Despite wanting to leave all things paranormal behind, life has something else in store for her.

During that shoot, she was working alongside production designer Joe Fallover who has worked on movies such as Joyride and The Lodgers, and she now looks at him as a mentor. “He’s so open and willing with his advice. Sometimes the industry, because it’s so small and limited, is precious about industry secrets, but he’s so generous with his knowledge.”

It was also the off-screen shenanigans that have held in her memory the most. A séance scene involving ghostly presences had them off-screen with fishing lines opening and closing cupboard doors and trying to keep their giggles at bay. Working with such a supportive group of people taught her a lot and boosted her belief in herself. “I had just been a set dresser on that shoot but it gave me the confidence to take on more responsibility and step up to do standby art directing full time.”

 

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Aoife Fealy is full of ideas about how we can increase the diversity in our media. “It has to start with production. They have the control and make all the decisions. We have to open the workforce out to accept more people, and fund and create stories written and directed by more diverse people. We’re starting to go in the right direction but this is happening very much on an indie level. It’s happening with short films, but the visibility just isn’t there. RTE will show Irish short films at half 11 at night. Who do they expect to see those?”

She feels that hiring diverse people to tell their own stories is a good first step and we’re beginning to see those stories trickle in, including in children’s media. The Toy Show, one of Ireland’s most popular shows every year, featured many disabled children who co-presented alongside Patrick Kielty. Fealy has proudly worked on a children’s show on RTE Junior called Dizzy Deliveries that stars a different disabled child in every episode, and teaches Lámh; a simplified Irish Sign Language. The show features Joe, a parcel delivery driver who, along with his flying robot Ozzy and with the help of disabled children, delivers packages around the country.

However, Fealy says Dizzy Deliveries, and shows like it, are still seem underfunded despite it being one of their most popular children’s shows. “You are the national broadcaster, this is one of the biggest Jr. shows, and it’s underfunded?” This misappropriation of RTEs funds has become even more evident as the scandal recently broke about the overpaying of The Toy Show’s previous host Ryan Tubridy.

In contrast to RTE, Fealy is happy to be a part of the group of filmmakers that are turning the status quo in Ireland on its head, and are producing work that goes against the world’s views of Ireland as a white country of trad music and alcohol. “Ireland has become such a multicultural place that what we think of as being ‘Ireland’ isn’t it anymore, and I don’t think it ever was. We’ve always had a diverse population and a diverse culture that has been compressed for a very long time. I’ve learnt so much about our history from the ‘black and Irish’ movement. There are so many historical black figures in Ireland. Our multiculturalism goes far back to even before the famine. People have been coming and going from this island for centuries.”

It is very important for Aoife Fealy to get to help tell these stories. She has previously worked on Pediment a film by Derek Ugochukwu about a biracial boy who embarks on a journey to learn more about his Irish heritage. She had been looking for a diverse script and this one immediately grabbed her attention. When possible, she always tries to bring people onto her team that have real-life experiences with the type of story that is being told.

For Pediment, she brought on biracial art director Ebun Oladeru (whose most recent work was on the Sinead O’Conner documentary Nothing Compares), whose viewpoint she had always valued and who could tell the story better than she, as a white person, could. Her goal is always to amplify marginalised voices and never to speak for them. In 2022, she worked on the short film Safe As Houses, which tells the story of Aggie, a woman with Down Syndrome, and her relationship with a young girl who lives in the same council estate. Not only was she drawn in by a disabled main character, but also the fact that it was an almost completely female creative team.

Now that she’s in a position to be choosy about the projects she takes on, it’s this direction she wants to continue to go in. “I’ve realised in the last few years that production design, as much as writing and filmmaking, is about storytelling. So if I can be a part of the storytelling process of people’s stories who don’t often get told, I’m gonna jump on board.”