Joy Hester

Somehow, one never really runs away, or I never have, and I find that the faster I go the more catches up with me… all the while time stands, to me, still – straight up and down like a great white sheet.
– Joy Hester

There is a photograph of Joy Hester taken by Grey Smith at their farm, ‘Gar’, at Hurstbridge in the spring of 1948. She is seated on a battered chaise- longue, squinting in the sunlight, one hand resting on her knee the other partially covering her face and she is dressed in loose-fitting, comfortable-looking work clothes. She may be smiling in the sun or at the camera and she emanates a relaxed, good- humoured confidence that is disarming and utterly without sentiment. It is an important image because it serves to remind us that Hester was not a creature of fantasy or reserve nor a woman cut off, by desire or circumstance, from the life around her. She was sensuous, buoyant and funny, a yarn-teller, a fast talker and a great mimic. If there is darkness, angst, pain, passion, and shoals of loneliness and ambiguity in her art, it was absorbed by a personality that was engaged in and delighted by the mundane occurrences and dramas of daily life and by its chaotic nature.

Joy Hester did not conceive of her role as artist as a special, privileged position that separated her from society at large or the demands of daily-life in particular. To her, the commonplace was special and valuable and she put up no barriers, indeed did not recognise them, between herself and the avalanche of small, trivial fragments that comprise all our lives. For, if she enjoyed reading The Women’s Weekly and the Missing Persons’ column in the paper – the latter providing the basis for an impromptu serial that was developed over the breakfast table at Avonsleigh – then she also read and absorbed the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud. She herself was a poet and wrote over two hundred poems between 1942 and 1953. Only three were published. They were an intrinsic part of her creative expression. This is best understood when it is realised that for her first solo exhibition in February, 1950, she tacked hand-written poems on the wall near her drawings. They were not meant as crude ‘illustrations’ of the drawings but verbal complements, extensions of the visual ideas expressed by the images.

Excerpt from Joy Hester: Art and Life by Janine Burke