Pool Series 1 by Joanna Lamb

Joanna Lamb’s Pool series is an exploration of reduction and abstraction, where the outline of a backyard pool frames an abstracted representation of the surrounding house and garden.

Since 2013, Lamb has been extending on this series, creating large-scale, ephemeral wall paintings. In this series, the pool functions as an idyllic yet fleeting vision of suburban life. It evokes the carefree moments of suburban summers, and the aspirational status associated with home ownership in suburbia. The water’s surface mirrors the world above but the nature of reflection resists permanence and is easily disrupted. Removed from their original context, the images take on the appearance of oversized logos, serving as bold, graphic emblems of the suburban dream.

The works continue a dialogue with the pool paintings of David Hockney and Ed Ruscha’s own series Nine Swimming Pools.

Joanna Lamb’s work explores themes of the everyday and suburbia. Through a practice of painting at the intersection of representation and abstraction, Lamb creates hard-edged compositions, reducing familiar domestic interiors and suburban sites—such as homes, roadways, and airports— into flattened perspectives and simplified flat blocks of colour. This process reflects the aesthetic monotony and uniformity of the Australian suburban landscape.

The distillation of colour, dimensionality, and form, creates a sense of anonymity, where recognisable environments are manipulated and transformed into generic spaces. The untouched surfaces of the paintings, devoid of visible brushwork, suggest a mechanical, impersonal application which conveys a clinical objectivity. This stillness mirrors the absence of human presence, which evokes a sense of detachment and disconnect, leaving the viewer to consider the impartiality and uniformity of these everyday settings. The flatness of the works is representative of loss. The loss to ourselves as everything is transformed into image.