Tessa Joy has been interested in art, particularly drawing, throughout her life. In her earlier years she was a nomadic world traveller sketching and keeping diaries while travelling through Australia, North, Central and South America. After years of informal training including many years of attending Ian de Souza’s life drawing group at the UWA boat shed, she began formal studies in Visual Art at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Forever restless, in her second year she organized to go to Madrid, Spain on exchange. What began as a year stretched into 3 as she found herself at the principal school of fine arts in Spain ( previously Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, now part of the Universidad Complutense) Apart from a highly stimulating artistic environment she discovered in Madrid, in these years she also crossed the Gibraltar Strait for the first time and began a lifelong fascination with Morocco and the wider Islamic world.
She returned to Perth travelling overland through Spain, Italy, Greece, Türkiye, Iran and India, completed her BA- Visual Arts and had her first solo show "Return Journey" in 2006. Heavily involved in the Fremantle artistic scenes as visual artist, musician and occasional performer she set up the World's End Studio on the cliff top at Bather's Beach in 2008. She both taught and produced artwork here for the next 7 years culminating in her solo exhibition "From the World's End” in 2015.
Moving to Melbourne in 2015 she began studies at the University of Melbourne in Curatorship and Italian language the highlight of which was a study trip to Florence in 2019. Although busy with work, study and a primary school aged child she continued to paint and draw in a home studio and print through the Australian Print Workshop in Fitzroy. She currently teaches Visual Arts at TAFE for Box Hill Institute and with Box Hill Art Group.
Her latest work focuses on printmaking and a fascination for the natural world which she calls "Nature Cravings" that arose from the month of confinement through the infamous Melbourne lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. This is a change from earlier work that focused more on portraits, scenes from her travels and occasional landscapes. She loves full intense colour but also enjoys working in black and white. Having arrived at no conclusive style she is constantly experimenting across a range of techniques and media and working toward a major show in Melbourne