Tenant Art Show 2025: Jupiter 4 awakened by artistic journey

Joanne paints in her sun-drenched lounge.

Joanne Banham’s art is deeply private. Paradoxically, it is also here for anyone to enjoy.

“My art is definitely personal and what I do is part of my own spiritual, healing journey,” Joanne, who produces and sells art as Jupiter 4, says.

“But I also believe art is subjective – it is for everyone – and I hope showing what’s come from my journey will resonate with and inspire others.”

Joanne paints, draws and considers her photographs from the sun-drenched living room in the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust home she shares with her son.

Carefully placed tubes of paint lie on a shaggy green rug on the floor of a room that’s now a studio opening to their new, first-season garden outside.

Joanne says moving to their ŌCHT home last year was an important step in her healing and self-reclamation after years of personal setbacks and PTSD.

The first of her self portrait series started life as a near-realistic drawing, reinterpreted.

“I love it here, it allows me to focus and the heal in a lovely, warm place where I can afford to life and look toward the future,” she says.

“I’m so grateful. I want to create a home for my inner child, the home I’d have liked when I was a kid, for me and for my son.

“We, and my art, have a home.”

Joanne describes herself as an intuitive, interpretive and at-times abstract artist. She doesn’t seek realism – she conveys raw emotion, identity, and transformation through colour, movement, and layered depth.

She often paints or draws the essence of the image.

“When I paint, it’s like channelling or meditation,” she says.

“I like to paint from the soul, of the soul; I feel people’s energy, and I try and express that energy in my work. I express all my feelings, good and bad. I cry into my paints, I laugh into them too.

“I always have no idea where a piece will end. I have some that I thought I’d finished and then I’ve gone back to, adding, developing, growing something different than before.”

It’s a far cry from her pre-quake life as a reuse creative, when she and her mother made and painted furniture, and created mannequin lamps.

Back then, the pair appeared in the coffee table book The She Shed.

Now, the latest chapters of her story of self-discovery are suggested in a series of paintings on her lounge wall. The first is colourful and naive, the last is richly textured and iridescent.

One of the series isn’t there – it’s about to be shown at the ŌCHT Tenant Art Show 2025.

Joanne says she’s no fine art painter - but her seasons/weather series brighten her home.

Ego Death depicts a figure with a broken heart on its sleeve emerging from the darkness cloaked in a vibrant yellow dress.

“I’ve had a low self-esteem all my life, and the series helped me step into my power, to know more about who I am – I am an artist,” she says.

“But to get that far, I had to have what I call an ego death, what some might call it a midlife crisis.

“It was hard, ugly, beautiful and painful and I’m now just really grateful it happened.”

The series isn’t her first exploring her trauma and recovery.

Her 2019 exhibition Bananas on Toast, in Wellington, was a “visual journey inside my mind, a really dark look at the early part of my healing”.

Five years on, her work is increasingly optimistic. Bright and warmly brooding paintings of the four seasons enliven her stairwell – even if “there’s no way I’m a fine art painter”.

Formalising her artistry has been an important part of Joanne’s journey. She has just completed the New Zealand Certificate in Creativity and she hopes to start a diploma soon.

The course exposed her to portraiture, still life and mixed media. She was challenged to try new methods: she’s painted Jacinda Ardern with a slice of bread, flax and a sponge.

She’s also found a new focus in photography. Her work, captured entirely on her smart phone, features in the We Dare Exhibition at the Linwood Eastside Gallery.

These experiences have also exposed her to future possibilities. She’d like to turn her art into a gallery and cafe or to help people – especially young people – heal through creativity.

“Art can help you discover yourself, it can be challenging and rewarding.

“I’ve grown as I’ve created and I love that I am now confident enough to say yes, I am an artist.

“For me, art has helped me believe in myself. I hope it can do that for other people, too.”

• Joanne’s work is part of the ŌCHT Tenant Art Show at Tūranga, the city library, February 4-March 2, 2025. Entry is free.