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...