Self-portraiture is one of the cornerstones of Joffe’s art. It is one that, aside from issues of practicality, she considers ‘a way of thinking about time passing’ – in regard to herself and to her relationship with her heroes and forebears, not least Paula Modersohn-Becker who painted what is likely the first ever half-length naked self-portrait by a female artist.

These works, charting the topography of the artist’s body as she stands, bends, places her hands on the small of her back, shifts her weight on to one foot then the other, are especially searching. Often she seems to be looking down – studying her own form from different angles – just as the works themselves, not confined by the paper’s edge, range speculatively across multiple sheets. They are among the largest works on paper Joffe has made. Yet, whether intimate or monumental – and Joffe’s work is capable of being both at the same time – her self-portraits are always in pursuit of the truthfulness that she seeks in all her subjects. Here she applies it to herself, the advantage being, as she says, that ‘there is no obligation to the sitter.’

While drawing has always been integral to Joffe’s practice, the medium of pastel offers a number of unique challenges and opportunities as she brings images robustly and truthfully to life. The artist has discussed the engrossing, highly physical experience of the work’s making, with pastel accumulating with a luminous purity across multiple sheets of paper laid out on her studio table or floor, as being markedly different from the act of painting and the ways in which oil behaves on canvas or board. ‘You can get a kind of brutality with pastel that you can’t with paint,’ she explains. ‘With paint there’s always an extension of your arm and brush. Whereas pastel is so primitive. You can’t draw hard enough.’