How telling the story of Joy Hester became the start of an eerie bond for Emma Louise Pursey

When actor Emma Louise Pursey began writing a play about artist Joy Hester, she could not have imagined that it would take more than twenty years to finish the work and that her life would parallel Hester’s in problematic ways.

Pursey, in her mid-20s and living in Brisbane, had never even heard of Hester, a spunky, bawdy, peroxide-blonde and overbearing mother who fights against gender stereotypes to carve out a place for herself among the “boys” of Melbourne’s modernist art scene.

Hester belonged to the famous Heide Circle, named after the farmhouse on the outskirts of Melbourne where John and Sunday Reed trained artists such as Sydney Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker.

“I was eager to cut my teeth on my first solo show, which is always a rite of passage for actors,” Pursey says when we meet in Collingwood on a sunny spring day. “I knew I wanted to do a solo exhibition about a woman in history, preferably an Australian woman, and my friend Amy Hyslop, who had just graduated from the University of Queensland in art history, said, ‘Emma, ​​read this,’ and she put this up: Joy Hester “I had the complete biography of Janine Burke and she said, ‘I think you’ll like Joy.’”

Pursey immediately identified with Hester’s unconventional nature, her interest in the avant-garde, and her desire to become an artist despite the obstacles to women of her time. Hester’s short life (she died in 1960 at the age of 40) was tumultuous, tragic and inspiring. Pursey had found his subject.

He did all he could about Hester, studying Burke’s biography and its sequels. Dear SunA collection of letters between Hester and Sunday Reed, as well as scanning library archives and reading other texts about Hester and her peers. With the help of Arts Queensland funding, Pursey and Hyslop co-wrote the first iteration of the book. Where is the joy? The title implies that Hester was under-recognized during her lifetime and even to this day.

After performing the work at the Metro Arts theater in Brisbane in November 2004, Pursey was encouraged to apply for a second round of development funding. But the project came to a halt when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in December 2004.

“I was 27 when Joy was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, the same age as her,” says Pursey. “What’s going on Joy, are you trying to kill me?” he thought.

Hester was fascinated with the occult, claimed to see ghosts, and kept a crystal ball in which she prophesied her own death. So it wasn’t too far off for Pursey to think the mischievous artist was playing with him from beyond the grave.

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Three days after Pursey was diagnosed, she learned that the swelling under her left eye was actually amyloidosis; it was a rare and incurable disease that could be confused with Hodgkin. He had surgery to reduce swelling in early 2005. A few months later she met and fell in love with singer-songwriter Grant McLennan, co-founder of the famous Brisbane band Go-Betweens.

“We were so happy, and then he and I had a housewarming party and an engagement party, and he died of a heart attack that day,” Pursey says. “Guests started arriving and we had to say, ‘I’m sorry, he’s not here anymore.'”

McLennan died in 2006 at the age of 48. In the midst of deep pain and ongoing health problems, Pursey put aside his play on Hester. “I had to step away from the project,” he says. He eventually left Brisbane and moved to Melbourne.

“I knew I had to go, there were too many memories and it was too painful,” she says. The Hester project was reignited in January 2023, when Pursey became angry that there was little mention of the artist in the game. SundayBased on the life of Sunday Reed.

“There was about a five-minute scene with Joy Hester in a three-hour play… She was a footnote. I left the theater in anger… I said to Joy: ‘Not on my watch, it’s time to finish what I started all those years ago.'”

“In a three-hour play, there was about a five-minute scene with Joy Hester… I said to Joy: ‘Not on my watch, it’s time to finish what I started all those years ago.’”

Emma Louise Bag

Pursey and I sit in the quiet walled courtyard of the studio where she is about to begin rehearsal. The woman, now 48, wears masculine jeans with cuffed cuffs, a shirt and sweater, loafers and thick socks, mimicking Hester’s appearance in a 1959 photograph of the artist taken just before he died. This is the photo Pursey looked at for inspiration.

“I’m not the flowery ’40s Joy in this exhibition,” Pursey says. “This isn’t the Joy you’ll immediately notice represented in the photographs and paintings of Albert Tucker, who refused to let ’40s blonde bombshell Joy escape her confines.”

Hester met Tucker, who was five years her senior, when she was 17. They married in 1941, when Hester was 20 years old. When she contracted Hodgkin’s disease when she was 27, she separated from Tucker and her two-year-old son, Sweeney, and lived in Sydney with the artist Gray Smith, with whom she was in a relationship.

If today’s world continues to be rocked by smart, bold, artistic and sexually adventurous women, in Hester’s day it was three times more so; Even John Reed called it a “hoyden.” But Sunday was Hester’s constant ally. He was also her lover, as art historians Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan explain in their 2015 book: Modern Love: The Life of John and Sunday Reed.

The bag is framed Where is the joy? From the perspective of a woman who is dying, or perhaps already dead, she recalls in flashback key parts of her life, from unwanted pregnancies to the shock of being diagnosed with a terminal illness and the challenges of making it as a female artist. Pursey captures Hester’s voice in a monologue that is funny, earthy, raw, and poignant, adopting a poetic rhythm (Hester wrote poetry as well as making art).

While Sunday Reed recognized and encouraged Hester’s talent, others ignored it. At Hester’s first solo exhibition in February 1950, not a single work was sold. Critics described his work as vague and amateurish, and reception to his later exhibitions remained lukewarm. It didn’t help that Hester drew instead of painting, because she couldn’t afford paint. But he also loved the spontaneity of drawing, so he worked quickly, using ink, watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pen and pencil, to create images of shocking intensity. The eyes stand out prominently; protruding, swollen, unstable, troubled, loving, emotional.

“Joy Hester was truly ahead of her time, and I think that’s why her work appeals to a contemporary audience,” says Kendrah Morgan, chief curator of the Heide Museum of Modern Art. “Drawing is now considered an autonomous medium in its own right, and we celebrate that. But when Hester created her drawings, they were considered inferior to painting. That’s one of the reasons why she wasn’t recognized. But I also think it probably gave her some creative freedom, because she realized she wasn’t going to be commercially successful, so she might as well do what she loves.”

Pursey gave a reading Where is the joy? It was performed in March last year at the Heide Library, in front of the fireplace where Hester sat and drew.
“It was very powerful,” Morgan says. “Emma kind of lived and breathed this because she really identifies with Hester.”

Where is the joy? Directed by Susie Dee; She is known for her works, staged with playwright Patricia Cornelius, about evil, incorrigible, out-of-control women who are often left on the sidelines.

“Yes, Joy is bad!” Dee says. “People who know her work and her experiences have very strong opinions about her. Some put her on a pedestal, the feminist artist who has never been given enough credit, then others judge her harshly. Giving up her child was a big thing as a woman at that time. But I hope they take that away too.” [from this production]Wow, what an incredible artist, what an incredible, brave, feminist. “He was brave in his art, in his personal life, in his politics, in his compassion.”

Where is the joy? At forty-five from October 30 to November 9.

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