There is something both intriguing and unsettling about an imagination that is consistently drawn towards the ugliest and most unusual aspects of nature in order to inspire its creative expression. Joey’s imagination, and therefore her art, is exactly these things. Obsessed with nature’s structural diversity and the surprises it has to offer, Joey has developed an entirely imagined world of forms drawn from an aquatic reality, and the contrast between her imagined world and the real one beneath the waves often leaves the viewer struggling to determine where mother nature left off, and Joey began.
Like the life-forms that inspire her, the formations that grow, mutate and interact across her canvasses are not constrained by the two dimensional structural limitations familiar to us land based mammals. Instead they search in every direction for their form, rejoicing in their weightless environment and disregarding the oppressive restraints of gravity. The often humorous, almost cartoon-like quality in much of Joey’s work serves to distance us from, and yet also heighten, the sense of the grotesque that lurks behind her brushstrokes and often breaks through entirely, confronting us with images that are difficult to digest and yet always manage to retain a certain fascinating beauty.
Just as the forms she creates are unrestrained by space or gravity, so Joey refuses to stick to any particular style, preferring to let the element of surprise articulate the layers of paint and the colour harmonies and clashes in her work. The paintings always develop as a natural, evolutionary process thereby avoiding the manifestos and imperatives that could stem the flow from the imagination to the canvas.
