“There wasn’t a well prescribed plan that I thought out and stuck to,” explains award-winning artist, illustrator and children’s picture book author Oliver Jeffers of the thinking – or lack thereof – behind his new exhibition Disasters and Interventions, which features work created over the past 14 years.
“So much of it was down to intuition and reaction. It’s only now looking backwards that I’m able to see that a lot of them have been about the state of the world.”
As visitors to the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast will discover, the new exhibition very much lives up to its title: it comprises a large selection of pieces in which Jeffers has taken an existing painting or image and then added his own personal artistic ‘intervention’.
Thus, tranquil landscapes are rudely interrupted by various ‘disasters’ – sinking ships (usually the Titanic), burning aircraft and crashed rockets – interdimensional portals magically appear at the feet of unsuspecting factory workers and children, and serious looking men suddenly find themselves pontificating over cartoon phallii.
“The start of this project was around 2010-11-12 and of course there was a lot of talk of the centenary of the Titanic sinking at that point,” explains Jeffers, who splits his time between Belfast and Brooklyn, of why our most infamous export features so prominently in his Disaster paintings.
Read more: ‘Billie Eilish is somewhat of a kindred spirit’, says Oliver Jeffers
“Partly, it’s rooted in that classic Belfast tendency to find humour in everything, you know? As in, ‘if you don’t laugh you’ll cry’. And who wants to cry?
“I learned a very dark sense of humour that’s inherent to this city, which I think is a great thing.”
Jeffers’ first Belfast exhibition for over 20 years includes his very first Disaster painting, 2012’s A Point of Light in The Dark.
This seminal work found him compelled to add the iconic red rocketship from his beloved 2004 book, How To Catch a Star, to an old, discarded art print he found on the street in New York.
“I moved in New York about 2007, and I was just setting up my my studio in Brooklyn there in 2008 and getting comfortable – and, you know, being broke,” explains the Australian-born, Belfast-raised artist.
I learned a very dark sense of humour that’s inherent to Belfast, which I think is a great thing
— Oliver Jeffers
Disasters and Interventions is Oliver’s first exhibition in Belfast for over 20 years
“A lot of the furniture in my studio is stuff that I found on the street. I just got into the habit of keeping an eye out in dumpsters for good things that other people were discarding.
“I don’t really know why I grabbed that first particular painting, because it was quite big – it was quite awkward to get it back on the subway at rush hour.
“But it was gut instinct. Where does that come from? I don’t know. Intuition is pattern recognition, and it just spoke to me.
“I think I just knew ‘I want to do something with this’, because I was using collage in an awful lot of my work at that point – cutting things up, picking up an old book or piece of paper and using it for the colour, like in my book The Great Paper Keeper.
Read more: Oliver Jeffers on bringing solar system down to Earth for Our Place in Space
“So I was in the habit of picking up potential art material, but this was the first time I inverted it and used the entire image and put something on it, rather than cutting it up and using it to be part of something else.”
While many of its pieces pass ironic comment on serious global issues like climate change and globalisation, Disasters and Interventions also taps into a mischievous creative impulse that will be familiar even to non-artists – be that the urge to deface our schoolbooks by adding comedy pirate beards and eyepatches (or worse) to people in photos, or engaging in full-blown graffiti.
“I think the best art and the best ideas really do come from a state of play and experimentation – from ‘what if?’,” offers Jeffers, who has just published his latest children’s picturebook, I’m Very Busy.
“With A Point of Light in The Dark, it was a bright red rocket that I stuck in, purely just because I thought the colour would work really well.
“And rather than have the rocket standing upright like it would be in the books, it was like, ‘I can do something interesting here’ and did it the other way around, as if it had just crashed. And it was funny. I can’t explain why – it just was.”
Read more: Oliver Jeffers Our Place in Space trail to land in Vietnam this autumn
He adds: “And yeah, there a few pieces where it’s like, very serious men at work – but when you really look at what they’re doing, they’ve just drawn a d***.”
From that point, Jeffers would occasionally create further ‘intervention’ pieces as a fun way to let off steam between other projects.
“I’ve always enjoyed doing them,” he tells me of creating these artistic interventions, for which he was constantly on the look-out for suitable artwork and images to use as background fodder.
“They started off as sort of like mental breaks, just a fun thing to do in-between other things, or while I was pottering around in the studio, something to keep me entertained and busy.
“The type of landscape [paintings] I was drawn to were always ones that had a degree of empty space in them – that looked like they were the background for something else.”
Ding Me On – Oliver Jeffers, 2025
As mentioned, Disasters and Interventions is Jeffers’ first exhibition in Belfast for over 20 years. It found the artist making a series of new works specifically for inclusion in the show at the Naughton Gallery – including Ding Me On, a piece which, appropriately enough, depicts a 1980s Belfast CityBus slowly sinking into a lake.
“We sort of accidentally moved back here about three or four years ago, and I’ve had one foot here and one foot in Brooklyn,” the father-of-two explains of reconnecting with the city which helped shape his artistic instincts.
“When I was back, it was just so refreshing how vibrant the art scene here was. There was a real sort of a grit to it, just really, really cool stuff happening. I wanted to be more involved in that.
“Then Ben [Crothers, at the McNaughton Gallery] had talked to me about doing a show. Like any of these things, the art world moves slowly.
“It takes a long time to put things together, so it’s been a couple of years in the works, but it’s good to lay claim again.”
Amusingly/fittingly, it seems that an unknown Belfast ‘artist’ who staged an intervention in one of Jeffers’ public works may have inadvertently inspired a couple of the cruder pieces in his latest exhibition.
“I did a mural in west Belfast for a U2 video, which got a bunch of attention,” he reveals.
“It was only supposed to be up for a week, but it actually lasted a couple of years. I was in New York and I remember asking a mate who was over if it had been graffitied yet.
“He was like, ‘You’re gonna love this. There’s one piece of graffiti on it: it’s in the lower left-hand corner, and somebody’s drawn a cock and balls.”
Disasters and Interventions runs at the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast until March 29. Oliver Jeffers will be taking part in a signing event for I’m Very Busy at No Alibis bookstore in Belfast on December 14 at 1pm.