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.

Her practice examines perception, recognition and the instability of interpretation. Through processes of repetition, erasure, layering and material transformation, McAllister explores how an image or object can remain recognisable while its defining information is altered, obscured or removed. Rather than seeking fixed representations, her work considers the impossibility of certainty and the ways meaning shifts through repeated acts of looking.

In her portrait practice, figures are constructed and disrupted through drawing and painting. Erasure operates as an active process rather than correction, allowing traces of previous decisions to remain within the work. Recognition becomes unstable: the figure moves between presence and absence, familiarity and uncertainty.

Her ceramic practice extends these concerns through material, touch and perception. Working with porcelain and experimental processes, she investigates alternative ways of encountering visual information and is developing research around sound, tactile form and accessibility.

McAllister’s recent work has been exhibited at Ulster University, Ulster Presents, Queen Street Studios and Pigment Studio during Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann.