Sitwell Cafe Gallery, Woodend Gallery
Joy painted large-scale watercolours of monumental landscapes, using minimal elements of colour. She was fascinated by the contradiction of power and fragility in dynamic coastal landscapes.
Walking was essential to Joy’s artistic practice; it allowed her to experience the landscape and its underlying geology as a key to understanding the secrets of the land and its past.
Her work was firmly rooted in the Romantic landscape tradition, exploring notions of the sublime in the 21st century with modern methods and materials. She was inspired by the heroic landscape work of Turner and the abstract expressionism of John Virtue. Often Joy’s work walked a narrow path between figuration and abstraction, as her response to the landscape painted both a known and invented place.
Joy saw this transitory coastal landscape as a fragile dynamic that created a very special ‘sense of place’.