Joanna Lamb Biography

Through a practice of painting and printmaking, Joanna Lamb’s hard-edged and highly refined geometric compositions depict spaces of (sub)urbanity as “an ongoing exploration of the idea of home.” Stylistically, the paintings waver between realism and abstraction. Generic domestic interiors and suburban sites such as homes, highways and airports are reduced to flat blocks of colour divested of linear perspective and often repeated in tonal variations. This reduction and repetition draws from the symmetric perfection of real estate advertisements and points to the aesthetic monotony of the Australian suburban landscape. An uncanny anonymity issues from Lamb’s purification of colour, dimensionality and form as everyday environments seem at once familiar and unfamiliar. Moreover, the surface of the paintings, seemingly untouched by the artist’s hand, effuses a clinical objectivity that is mirrored in the empty, unpeopled scenes. As a result the works omit a feeling of disconnectedness, impartial to the inclusion of human interaction.