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Joanna Margaret Paul retrospective

André Chumko

Amajor retrospective exhibition of New Zealand multidisciplinary artist Joanna Margaret Paul’s work has opened at City Gallery in Wellington.

Paul was born in Hamilton in 1945 but died suddenly aged 57 in 2003.

The legacy exhibition, Imagined in the Context of a Room, shows her paintings, drawings, poetry, photography and filmmaking work spanning her 34-year career from the 1970s to the 2000s.

The exhibition has already been seen by more than 50,000 people at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery.

‘‘People come in and understand what a figure and creative force Joanna was,’’ Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds said in an interview.

Hammonds worked with Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Lauren Gutsell and Greg Donson from Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery to co-curate the exhibition, and said they collaborated to take an in-depth look at Paul’s work.

Paul was raised with ideas of modernism, architecture, literature and art by her parents, the publisher Blackwood Paul and artist and writer Janet Paul.

JoannaMargaret Paul went to Wellington’sMarsden College, and after stints studying languages atWaikato University and then travelling to London for its Sir John Cass School, she studied at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts under teachers including Colin McCahon.

Periodically after then, she lived in Dunedin and Wellington, marrying fellow artist Jeffrey Harris in 1971 and having four children together, one of whom died aged eight months. After her marriage ended Paul settled in Whanganui.

She died after collapsing in a Rotorua thermal pool in 2003.

Hammonds said Paul’s energetic, deep work had risen to prominence and resonated with contemporary generations. Paul was a figure of importance across a range of artistic disciplines, she said, exploring issues related to women’s experiences, artists’ experiences, domesticity, motherhood, built heritage, living in Aotearoa, the environment and human rights.

Paul seemed to always be documenting what she was experiencing in life, Hammonds said: what a new city looked like for her, new social groups and people, environments and interiors.

The way Paul had an impulse to change disciplines was the waymany contemporary artists worked now, Hammonds said.

Paul’s work explored the concept of time as it related to art, and the labours of art-making. Particularly with her photography, Hammonds said, there was real personal sense of someone ‘‘stepping outside, taking the time they’ve got and using it well’’.

She also had a constant, productive output through her artistic working life.

Paul focused on domestic still life in much of her diary-like work, which was human, honest, and intimate, Hammonds said.

In her art Paul depicted functional spaces which supported her life, which she created work in, and which she held memories of.

Paul said in one of her writings that she focused on capturing the detail of painted flowers on a jug as attentively as the camellias or peonies inside them.

‘‘She had this ability to collapse the margins between things – everything is important,’’ Hammonds said.

Paul’s body of work told the story of one artist journeying through a life full of great joys, challenges, losses and grief, she said.

‘‘Life is quite present in her work.’’

Imagined in the Context of a Room runs to February 5, free.

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2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281728388398875

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