Mary Fairburn

Fairburn was born in London. She was educated at St Swithun's School, Winchester, the Winchester School of Art and the Institute of Education, University of London. In the mid-1950s, she taught art at St. Bonaventure's boys' school Forest Gate, east of London, and in 1958 took a job at Masjid-i-Sulieman, Iran, teaching art and music to the children of the employees of an American oil company. In 1957 and again in the early 1960s, she painted a number of (now destroyed) murals on religious subjects at St. Peter's primary school in Winchester. She travelled in Europe and Africa during 1962 to 1965. She returned to Winchester, and held a number of exhibitions.

In 1968–70, she spent many months constructing and painting a set of Stations of the Cross, altar carvings, and a ceiling mural of the Holy Trinity, in the newly built St. Stephen's Catholic church, in the Winchester suburb of Oliver's Battery. Unable to find secure housing or employment, Fairburn left England in autumn 1974, and travelled through Asia, eventually settling in Melbourne, Australia, where she taught a range of courses for the Council for Adult Education, and met her second husband, Patrick Flegg. They retired in 1993 to Castlemaine, Victoria, where Fairburn continued painting, and also organised and played in a number of musical ensembles. She played mandolin and mandola on a CD recording, "Anduin: The Great River" (2001), by the band Odds and Sods, which featured the music of Patrick Currie Flegg. In 2012, the story of her work for Tolkien was reported by literary scholar Paul Tankard, in the Times Literary Supplement. This led to her surviving Tolkien illustrations, with two newly-painted ones, being published by HarperCollins in the Official Tolkien Calendar 2015. Her young adult fantasy novel, Selangath: A Legend of the Sea, with her own illustrations, was self-published in 2019. In October 2020, her autobiography, Borne on the Wind: Memoirs of an Artist, was published. It includes many first-time reproductions, in colour, of art works from across her entire career. In 2021, she was the subject of a short film, "Mary Fairburn: Artist Musician Writer Universal Wanderer," by filmmaker Christine McCue.

Fairburn's art work has been exhibited in Winchester, Amantea (Italy), Melbourne and Castlemaine.