Where Is Joy?

There is a famous photograph of artist Joy Hester doing a cartwheel in the grounds of Heidi, skirt flying and flashing her knickers.  The photograph captures Hester’s irrepressible joie de vivre so well that Claire Jaeger reproduced it in her marvellous 1995 documentary about Hester The Good Looker.  But therein lies the irony of Hester’s life – a constant awareness of death that shadows her joie de vivre and stimulates her creativity.  That very juxtaposition is forcefully and poignantly brought out in Emma Louise Pursey’s performance as Hester in her Where Is Joy?

Pursey is never still and – aided or sharpened by director Susie Dee’s great and characteristic skill in making meaning out of movement – she contrasts a restless energy with one obstacle or misfortune after another.  Her father dies when she’s twelve.  She’s diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at twenty-seven.  She resists a constant dread with every fibre of her being – as she resists the heartbreaks in her life – familial, medical, romantic and artistic – but not by evasion or sugarcoating.  Her highly individual black ink on white art confronts these very things.  If you’ve not seen her striking images, look them up.

But I doubt that anyone who hasn’t heard of Joy Hester and isn’t at the least curious about her art and life, will rush to this show – unless they are brought along by someone who is curious.  And if the initiates are not drawn in by Pursey’s vitality, by the breakneck but poetic narrative and the utter originality of the art, then nothing will convince them.  Although Hester was the first and only woman in the Heidi circle – sitting on the floor by the fire, drawing with brush and ink, listening to the conversations of her first husband, Albert Tucker, Syd Nolan, patrons the Reeds, et al. – she was pretty well dismissed as an artist (except by her peers) in her lifetime and never sold a single work.

Pursey bursts onto a bare stage – and her Joy Hester is at once challenging, rude, buzzing, rebellious, confrontational, bawdy, ecstatic, sad, bitter, wisecracking, never stopping, talking a million miles a minute until we are swept up in the onrush of her narrative.  She never let up on her insistence on being herself – and not for a second does she invite pity.  But we feel for her anyway – and we admire her.

Pursey’s text, which evolved over twenty-one years, sets out to answer the question Where Is Joy? with this powerful ‘reimagining’ – as she puts it.  What finally spurred her to bring her thoughts and images together was the depiction of Joy Hester in the MTC’s Sunday in which Hester is – as I remember it – virtually a servant of Sunday Reed. 

In this evocation of Joy Hester, we never see any of her complete images.  Rather Sarah Mary Chadwick’s design, with technical consultant Justin Gardam, gives us Hester’s method and the thoughts and feelings behind them in impressionist images, projected on the stage wall, through a huge black frame.  In a delicious moment, Pursey steps through the frame, away from the black ink images with their broad moving brush, to continue downstage to continue her story – as if to emphasise that the art comes from the story...  Meanwhile, Amelia Lever Davidson’s lighting reflects and enhances the heights and troughs of Hester’ life – and there are plenty of both.

When Pursey’s Hester tells the story of her life, the images are vivid and striking.  She creates other characters in her life more by depicting Hester’s confrontations with them rather than impersonation – but those so important characters are there: her cruel, bullying mother, Sunday Reed, Tucker, second husband artist Gray Smith and her numerous – pessimistic or dismissive - doctors.  By contrast, when Hester talks about her method and her intentions, the text does perhaps become a little abstract (as it can do when an artist seeks to ‘explain’) and for a moment loses us.  And if Where Is Joy? feels just a touch long, it is surely more to do with Pursey’s high energy, relentless performance that burns like the fire that Joy Hester was.

Michael Brindley

Photogapher: Amber Schmidt