The work of Joy Hester offers deeply personal insights into the complexities of love, identity and loss. She began her training in 1936 in a commercial art programme at Brighton Technical School. She went on to study drawing at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne from 1937 to 1938, enrolling both in painting and design. At the same time she attended life drawing classes at the Victorian Artists Society in East Melbourne.
She met art patrons Sunday and John Reed in 1939, regularly spending time at Heide, their home in Bulleen. In the early 1940s J. Hester and her first husband Albert Tucker (1914-1999) joined the Heide Circle, working alongside notable artists including Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), Danila Vassilieff (1897-1958), Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) and John Perceval (1923-2000). J. Hester made prolific contributions to the Angry Penguins journal, which operated as an extension of the Heide Circle, and revolutionised new understandings of Australian modernism through art and literature.

Central to J. Hester’s drawings was an interest in the realm of human relationships in all of their intricacies. Romantic yet haunting imagery paints portraits of internal conflict, echoing a voice often overshadowed by her male contemporaries within historical art discourse. Bodies entangled within the Love series (1948-1949) serve as theatrical musings of intimacy and passion. J. Hester draws on depictions of romantic embrace within many of these works. Ephemeral connotations of desire and connection are clouded by a sense of unease, rendered in contrasting dark and light figures of the feminine and masculine. The playful nature of J. Hester’s style within this series however denies eroticism, bringing sexuality and sensibility into relation.

During the mid-1940s much of her work was informed by concerns of grief and mortality. Interested in both cultural and psychological impacts of tragedy and the realities of wartime Australia, her drawings during this period took on a more surreal nature. A Frightened Woman (1945) forms a nuanced study of a World War II Nazi prison camp victim. J. Hester captured a ghostly quality in the detailed eyes of the woman. A recurring motif for J. Hester, these distinctive stylised eyes render an unsettling sense of intimacy, decay and raw human emotion. Highly autobiographical, her From an Incredible Night Dream series (1946-1947) recounts her diagnosis and early experiences with Hodgkin’s disease. A series of female nudes, bold ink line work twisted into bodily shapes evoke an almost tangible sense of discomfort. Motifs such as masks and references to illness and radiation treatment are also present throughout her later work.

J. Hester also explored yearning, nature and relationships in over two hundred poems, often experimental in nature. Notable works include “Dream for Winter” (1947), “Micetto, Father of Kisses” (1951) and “Freak Rose” (1952).

J. Hester’s work was exhibited in three solo exhibitions and many group exhibitions. Her legacy has lived on in a number of posthumous exhibitions including a major retrospective at both the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Her work is held at the majority of Australia’s notable institutions.