Exhibition on display until Sunday 9 November
Joanna Margaret Paul ‘Inventories’ 1977, gouache on paper, 1981/11/1.1. Collection of Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery. Purchased, 1981.
Joanna Margaret Paul: Imagined in the context of a room
With a multi-disciplinary practice spanning drawing, painting, poetry, photography and film, Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) was an important artist of her generation. Born in Hamilton as the eldest child of Janet and Blackwood Paul, literary and artistic parents who were advocates of New Zealand modernism, Paul studied languages and literature before embarking on her artistic career. Attending Elam in the late 1960s, she moved to Ōtepoti Dunedin in 1970, establishing an art practice shaped by experimentation and her lived experiences, later settling in Whanganui.
The margin between the landscape and the home was a space that Paul constantly navigated through her work. Early works made in Ōtepoti, Port Chalmers and Seacliff claim Paul a position as a major painter of the period, asserting her understanding of her context and a faith in her own view. Moving between the coastal landscape, the urban fringe and the domestic interior, this period created a foundation that would underpin her future work. As time passed, and Paul’s life changed, her work came to reflect these different directions. Her home offered an environment where objects, spaces and people acted as markers of memory, identity, domestic life, relationships and time.
Photography and experimental film, much of which has only come to light in recent years, created a counterpoint to painting, drawing, and later poetry, reflecting a multi-faceted approach that was distinct from many of her contemporaries.
Imagined in the context of a room recognises the need for a stronger understanding of the wide arc of Paul’s career. The exhibition traces the key journeys that shaped the artist’s career, from Ōtepoti, to Banks Peninsula to Wellington, and then Whanganui and beyond. Whanganui would be Paul’s home from 1985 until her death in 2003, and the city and surrounding region strongly shaped the later decades of her practice. This included a rising activism within her work, as she witnessed and responded to incursions onto the built and cultural landscapes of Whanganui. Across more than four decades, Paul’s work legitimised her experiences as a woman and a mother, as a pioneering experimental filmmaker, and as a feminist interested in the interior, in intimacy, poetry, literature and religious practice. In doing so, she laid the groundwork for a contemporary generation whose multi-disciplinary approach is foreshadowed in Paul’s career.
This exhibition was first staged in 2021 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and toured to Christchurch Art Gallery and City Gallery, Wellington. It has now come full circle home to Whanganui as its final destination and Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery is proud to be celebrating the work of an artist who was deeply connected to this city and an important part of the cultural and artistic community.
Exhibition curated by Greg Donson, Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery; Lauren Gutsell and Lucy Hammonds, Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Exhibition and accompanying publication developed and led by Dunedin Public Art Gallery, project partner Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery.
