Unfurl: Gatherings and Collections

In Ballarat-based artist Joanne Sisson’s paintings, delicate stems arc, loop and wander across the canvas, their restless movement held — though never contained — within crystal, vintage glass and humble vessels. The flowers appear perpetually on the verge of outgrowing their arrangements, caught somewhere between cultivation and wildness.

Sisson’s compositions occupy two interconnected worlds: the airy realm above the vessel, where stems reach outward and upward, and the submerged world below, where those same forms twist and coil through transparent glass. It is a space of doubling and reflection, where what is seen and what is hidden exist in conversation.

Working within the compressed pictorial space of the modernist still-life tradition, Sisson dispenses with deep perspective, locating her subjects within only the faintest suggestion of a tabletop, often established by little more than a subtle shift in tone against an otherwise uninterrupted field of colour. The celebrated, comparatively small series of still-life paintings John Brack completed in the 1950s comes to mind: their crisp edges, restrained backgrounds, and the precise visual tension between organic irregularity and geometric order.

The directness and graphic clarity with which Brack depicted his subjects reflected both a stylistic moment and a particular social climate — a postwar preference for restraint, efficiency and economy over ornament. Sisson carries this inheritance into a contemporary practice, expanding the isolated botanical form into a more abundant language of colour and movement.

Across Unfurl, Sisson’s flowers acquire an unexpected presence. A stem of sedum bends gently beneath the weight of its bloom, its curve recalling the poised movement of a ballet dancer. Such moments lend the paintings a distinct theatricality, as though each arrangement possesses its own temperament: a cast of characters suspended in a scene.