I arrive at Joanna Lamb’s studio on a hot Perth summer’s day. ‘Are you OK?’ yells the next-door neighbour as I get out of the car and orientate myself. ‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m just going to see Jo.’ … ‘Ah OK,’ he replies, pure WA style. Here I pause and take in Jo’s place. It is one of her paintings – a house nestled behind a high brick fence, peaked salmon tiled roof peeping out from leafy foliage, fronted by a double garage with a car in the driveway. I am now at home in one of Jo’s paintings.

If you are familiar with Joanna Lamb’s oeuvre, the paintings in this exhibition may at first feel familiar. Urban paintings of the house next door—painted in a cool flat hard-edged manner that we have come to know and appreciate. However, as one sits with them, a sense of the unfamiliar begins to creep in. What is it about these artworks that brings forth a different sensibility from her previous exhibitions? What is this strangeness that I am feeling here and now?

In these paintings we are on the outside looking in, not seeming to be able to find an open gate, an open window or a door ajar to allow us entry. Tall walls become impenetrable planes that we slide along, gates are shut and locked, windows are shuttered or dark and foreboding and even the flowering plants and trees, which give us coolness and delight, hold us at bay.

While we may be standing in front of a painting of a house and garden, we are in a psychological space, a space of Joanna’s making—a meditation on her experience of the contemporary world and its superficiality. It is the psychic space of unhomeliness, of the uncanny.[1] She speaks too of the reception of her artworks in a gallery context—of viewers doing a quick tour of the gallery and leaving without stopping to look: Looked over and overlooked. Joanna’s concern is that in our contemporary world all is surface: a façade. We no longer know how to engage. The question raised by these works is: “How do we get beyond that?” Her answer is to slow down. These are slow paintings.

Joanna Lamb was an early adopter of technology using the computer as a tool to create large works in the 1990’s. The “flatness” of the screen the flattening out of the picture plane have become central to the aesthetic of her work, but she maintains that, for her, the computer remains a tool, not an end-in-itself. The works themselves are handmade, and her aim is to disrupt the gloss of the mass of imagery that is constantly in our face and on our devices. Scroll culture!

It's bringing back the skill … reversing that whole mass of imagery so that you see and actually think very long and slowly about an image and how it's put together and, how you are actually making it and spending time … probably as a revolt against … everything fast.[2]

There is something cryptic in Joanna’s words. Who is the “you” that is spending time looking at and making the image, and who has the skill to do so? Roland Barthes’ essay, ‘Death of the Author’ (1967), tells us that the meaning of a work derives from the reader’s/viewer’s interpretation, rather than the author’s/artist’s intention.[3] In contemporary visual culture we scroll and “read” images instantly, but what is “it” that we are we able to see, let alone experience? This is house. No! This “not” a house (Ceci n’est pas un maison), just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), in The Treason of Images (1928-9), is not a pipe![4]

It is a very easy thing to “read” a figurative painting for content, but to experience a Joanna Lamb painting requires time and some effort. Her paintings both are, and they are not figurative paintings. Joanna comments that she delights in this duality, the fact that the paintings are first and foremost a combination of abstract shapes, colours and tones, out of which emerges something we recognize as a house and garden. This allows for multiplicity of meaning and a/effects. Thus, a “wall” is not just a wall, but also an abstract shape interacting with other abstract shapes and operating as a psychological barrier. The shower of light and deep pinks of the vincas bring joy as they spray across the canvas, framing the plane of purple-grey that we may read as a “wall”. These are the abstract forces in figuration. The multiplicity of an image in Joanna Lamb’s paintings is both its pleasure and its disturbance, something that may be felt but that is often overlooked and can never just be taken in at a glance.

That leaves us with a question: What do paintings want?[5] The work of art is to take us on a journey, through the play of planes and light and colour into a space of sensation and thought. There are two small paintings that Joanna points to as a starting point for the development and trajectory of this body of work. They are unusual at once because both are images of a puffed-up nesting pigeon. Joanna Lamb’s urbanscapes very rarely include life of the animal variety and so they create a sense of curiosity. The point of view of the viewer is from inside looking out. The two paintings are identical in their subject matter, composition and dimensions, but the use of colour creates a very different experience, sensation and meaning. One is a study in hues of pinks and chromatic violet greys and, with its warm pinks and violets, presses in on us creating a close, intimate and almost claustrophobic space. Joanna has titled this painting ‘7 July 2024, 11.48 am in Pink’. The other, ‘7 July 2024, 11.48 am with Landscape’, painted in muted earth browns and greys, opens out onto a garden creating an openness and a sense of deep space. Two paintings: One creating a space of intimacy and one creating a space of breath, openness and possibility. With this modest but touching gesture Joanna acknowledges that ‘while there is always superficiality, that doesn’t mean you can’t love life and find beauty in life.’ 

Spending the day with Joanna Lamb’s paintings is a privilege and a joy. They offer us the opportunity to daydream and wonder, as our eyes wander across the surfaces, jump across planes of colour, stopping here and there to take satisfaction in the exquisite juxtapositions of colour and plane that make a heart sing … and then, gasp at the audacious conceits that disrupt the illusion of “reality,” so as to tease our eyes and disturb our psyches. Need we be told that THIS is NOT a house, a pigeon, a garden or a fence but rather a joyful and audacious play with the visual language that just happens to sometimes give the illusion of the house across the road. This is the pleasure of these paintings. They are paintings of the mind and the body, or rather the mind-body, to be puzzled over and to be enjoyed but never overlooked.

[1] Sigmund Freud talks of the “uncanny” as the sense of unhomeliness (unheimlich), that unsettling feeling that arises when one experiences something familiar yet alien. See Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf, (1919), accessed 19th March 2025.

[2] Interview with Joanne Lamb, 26th February 2025.

[3] Barthes, Roland, 1967, ‘Death of the Author’, translated Richard Howe. See https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf, accessed 14 March 2025.

[4] See Foucault, Michel, 1983, This is Not a Pipe, Berkely: University of California Press.

[5] See Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.