When the defining figures of Australian Modernism are discussed, particularly the legendary Heide Circle, artists like Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd are often among the first to be namechecked. However, this new one-woman show draws one of the collective’s more overlooked artists out from the margins, asking the question: Where is Joy?

Or, perhaps more aptly, who is Joy Hester? For actor, writer and producer Emma Louise Pursey, she has been a source of inspiration, obsession and uncannily relatable hardships for some 21 years. Pursey devised and developed her first show about Hester in 2004 at the age of 26. The following year, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma – the same disease that Hester was diagnosed with at the same age of 27.

While Pursey was soon after re-diagnosed with a very rare disease, amyloidosis, she was handed similarly bleak odds to Hester – and just like her Modernist hero, she has insisted on beating those odds.

Emma Louise Pursey: Where is Joy? Photo © Amber Schmidt

Following years of research and enduring health battles, this latest take on Joy Hester’s story lands at fortyfivedownstairs – and there really couldn’t be a more fitting location for a play about a Melbourne artist of this stature than an underground theatre below an art gallery on Flinders Lane. 

However, you could easily find yourself lost if you don’t already have a decent handle on the who’s who of the Heide Circle (who famously gathered and worked at a former dairy farm along a stretch of the Yarra River, which you can now visit as the Heide Museum of Modern Art). 

The dialogue clips along at a frenetic pace, a rapid-fire succession of facts about Hester’s life. It moves so quickly that it’s difficult to quite grasp onto the particulars of who is who, which can make it even more difficult to follow the non-sequential order of events. Interestingly, the play doesn’t spend as long as you might think lingering on her days at Heide.

Perhaps, this is because Joy never truly felt like “one of the boys” – the amplified sexism and ableism of her time often relegating her artistry to the sidelines. Or, perhaps it’s because Pursey is more interested in the broader picture of Joy’s life, and not just one chapter. 

Emma Louise Pursey: Where is Joy? Photo © Amber Schmidt

Where is Joy? makes for an interesting companion piece to Anthony Weigh’s Sunday, the MTC production which places its focus on Heide’s wealthy patron, Melbourne socialite Sunday Reed. Reed helped to raise Hester’s child, but there are more intriguing parallels that can be gleaned between these women’s intersecting lives, a humble reminder of the additional layers of difficulty and lack of bodily autonomy that women faced in all-too-recent history. Yet in the latter show, Hester is little more than a minor side character.

Here, we meet an unapologetic woman who hungers for more – a fitting subject for the incomparable director Susie Dee (frequent collaborator of formidable feminist playwright Patricia Cornelius). She loathes her mother, she has little regard for the men she uses along the way, and she yearns to parent to the two children she had with her second husband, fellow artist Gray Smith – in spite of (or perhaps because of) the deep longing she carries for the babies she lost before. She’s a survivor. An Aussie battler. A Victorian icon.

The staging is stripped back, Pursey slouches in a button-down and jeans. Intermittent video projections depict hands smearing around in thick black paint or ink – a nod to her process of painting on the ground – and snippets of Hester’s paintings. 

Yet, for all of the dizzying details, there is one facet of the artist’s life that could have used more attention: her art. Joy rarely talks about her inspirations and her practice. We learn of her preference for the immediacy of ink over fussing around with oil paints. We learn that she doesn’t care to paint depictions of death and dying – a topic which casts a shadow over many of her days. But what does Joy actually like to paint? What drives her creativity? Does her process offer her catharsis, or an escape? 

A biographical text is a difficult thing to master. If you get too lost in the subject or carried away with cramming in facts, you can start to lose the audience, and even a tight 70-minute runtime can grow somewhat tedious. Meanwhile, if you lean more into the “vibes”, you may end up with something more entertaining, but you do risk upsetting the purists and the subject-nerds.

Where Is Joy? paints a portrait of a woman, but it doesn’t necessarily unveil an artist.

Where is Joy? plays at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne until 9 November.