For more than twenty years Joanna Lamb has been exploring the overlooked aesthetic qualities of Perth’s suburbs. Her work is exquisitely rendered, leaning towards abstraction as individual pictorial elements are all treated with the same level of attention. Her swimming pool images began after she isolated a backyard pool in a painting of a suburban home.

Becoming interested in the possibility of depicting homes in reflection only, and inspired by the shapes that backyard pools take, this commission was an opportunity to extend the work beyond the canvas and apply them directly onto walls. Lamb sees them as mapping out a relationship between the light and feel of Perth and Los Angeles, and as, in part, an homage to the backyard pool photos of LA artist Ed Ruscha (1937 – ).

In kinship with Ruscha’s non-expressive, near-conceptual approach to art-making, Lamb’s pools use a carefully arranged tonal sequence of pastel colours to create images that have a crisp, post-Pop Art coolness.