She was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism.

[1] Her work was charged with a heightened awareness of mortality due to the death of her father during her childhood, the threat of war, and her personal experience with Hodgkin's disease.

[2] In 1938 Hester met fellow artist Albert Tucker and began living with him intermittently in East Melbourne.

[7] Hester met Melbourne-based art patron Sunday Reed in 1939 at the Herald Exhibition, which brought British and French artworks to Australia for the first time.

[1] She was a contemporary of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, Yosl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff during this period.

[2] During the early 40s, Hester began depicting the ambience of daily life, via ink drawings of street scenes and factory workers.

[1] A Frightened Woman (1945) served as a seminal point in establishing Hester's style and media moving forward.

[9] She typically worked on a small scale in black ink and wash, however, Australian modernism favoured large oil paintings,[9] like those of Nolan.

[16] Reviewing her work for Time in 2001, Michael Fitzgerald wrote "Forty-one years after her death, Hester's drawings still suck the oxygen from the air, providing some of the clearest-eyed images in Australian art".

[14] In 2018 her Love and The Lovers series of works featured in a joint exhibit with Patricia Piccinini at TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Piccinini credited Hester as a major influence on her own practice; stating: "I love the way her painting, especially those with merged features, are simultaneously surreal and figurative.

[19] Joy Hester's art was included in the exhibition, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now at the National Gallery of Australia, in 2021-2022.