Joanna Paul

Joanna Margaret Paul (14 December 1945 – 29 May 2003) was a New Zealand visual artist, poet and film-maker.

Early life and education Paul was one of four daughters of pioneering New Zealand publisher Blackwood Paul and artist and writer Janet Paul.

Paul attended Samuel Marsden Collegiate School from 1959 until 1962, then the University of Waikato in 1963, studying history, French and English. In 1964, she travelled to London with her family for a year, studying at the Sir John Cass School. On returning to New Zealand, she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Auckland in 1968; in 1967 she enrolled at Elam School of Fine Arts, studying under teachers such as Colin McCahon, Greer Twiss and Tom Hutchins, and alongside fellow students Christine Hellyar, Marte Szirmay and Leon Narbey. She graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1969. In 1973 Paul and Harris spent a year in Wellington, where their first daughter was born; in 1976 a second daughter was born, who died of a heart defect at the age of eight months. In 1975 she was included in the exhibition Six Women Artists in Christchurch. In the publication accompanying the exhibition she stated:

As a woman painting is not a job, not even a vocation. It is a part of life, subject to the strains, and joys, of domestic life. ... Painting for me as a woman is an ordinary act – about the great meaning in ordinary things.

In 1983 Paul received the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago. The following year, after the end of her marriage, she moved briefly to Wellington and then settled in Whanganui, where she lived for the rest of her life, not discounting time spent working in various New Zealand cities, including a year in Wellington when she held the Rita Angus Residency in 1993.

The first major survey of Paul's work was shown at the Sarjeant Art Gallery in 1989.

In 2003 Paul collapsed while bathing in a thermal pool in the Polynesian Spas in Rotorua. She died in hospital two days later. Jill Trevelyan writes 'An inventory of her studio revealed some 5000 artworks, many of which had never been exhibited, drawings, photographs and films. She also left a body of work as a poet and prose writer, including a wealth of published material.'

Legacy A tribute exhibition, Beauty, Even, was organised by the City Gallery Wellington the following year and toured to other North Island locations.

In early 2015, three of Paul's films featured in a two person exhibition with contemporary artist Ziggy Lever commissioned by Ramp Gallery Hamilton. Curated by Paula Booker and titled 'Thinking Feeling' the moving image exhibition considered the affective dimension of Paul's detailed and often dream-like non-narrative film works. The exhibition occasioned an eponymous catalogue by Ramp Press and also travelled to The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, Christchurch.

In 2015 Solomon Nagler and Mark Williams curated Six Artists respond to the work of Joanna Margaret Paul, a collection of short films responding to Paul's poems, by artists Nova Paul, Rachel Shearer, Sonya Lacey, Miranda Parkes, Shannon Te Ao and the collective Popular Productions. This programme of work was screened at the Artists' Moving Image Programme of the BFI London Film Festival 2015, where curator Mark Williams also gave presentation about Paul's practice.

Paul's work was included in Fragments of a World: Artists Working in Film and Photography 1973–1987, curated in 2015 by Dr Sandy Callister for the Adam Art Gallery. The exhibition brought together the work of artists (Paul, Alexis Hunter, Jane Campion, Rhonnda Bosworth, Minerva Betts, Popular Productions and Janet Bayly) who early in their careers explored photography and film, from a feminist perspective. The exhibition travelled to Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland in 2016.

In December 2016 film maker and curator Peter Todd, presented a screening of her films Through a Different Lens / Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul at the Close-Up Film Centre in London. The programme, which had previously screened in New Zealand, would later screen at The Cinema Museum London and in Australia and Europe. Todd wrote an accompanying essay and writer and academic Eleanor Woodhouse would review the programme in her essay The Transcendent and Domestic in Joanna Margaret Paul’s Films. In 2019 New Zealand born artist Kate Davis, Peter Todd, and academic and writer Sarah Neely would present Margaret Tait & Joanna Margaret Paul: People and Places at the Glasgow Film Festival.

A major retrospective exhibition celebrating her career and legacy Joanna Margaret Paul: Imagined in the Context of a Room, was held at Dunedin Public Art Gallery between 7 August - 14 November 2021, Christchurch Art Gallery held Te Puna o Waiwhetū from 4 December 2021 – 13 March 2022 developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery with project partner Sarjeant Art Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui. The accompanying illustrated publication features new essays by the exhibition’s curators Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Greg Donson, who were joined in this project by writers Pascal Harris, Emma Bugden, Andrea Bell and Joanna Osborne.

In August 2024, a small book of Paul's artwork and poetry was published, accompanied by an exhibition of her work. The book, Spring in the Parapara was curated by the artist's long-time friend, Bernadette Hall.

Exhibitions

1989 Joanna Margaret Paul: Chronicle/Chronology, Sarjeant Gallery 1995 The Figured Landscape, City Gallery Wellington 2015 Lunch Poems: Kate Newby and Joanna Margaret Paul, Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland 2017 Not Nostalgia, Bowerbank Ninow, Auckland. 2021 Imagined in the Context of a Room, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Publications

Paul published a number of small chapbooks, in addition to pieces of critical and observational writing in various New Zealand publications.

Rilke's Life of Mary, 1970 Unwrapping the Body, Bothwell: Dunedin, 1970 The Lone Goose, John McIndoe: Dunedin, 1979 With Mary Paul, Gestures of Prayer, Bothwell: Dunedin, 1981 As I Sat ..., 1985–1986 Ago, 1985–1986 Rose, handprinted by Brendan O'Brien, Rita Angus Cottage, Wellington, 2000 The Cherry Now, Ferbank Studio: Wellington, 2001 Forbidden Apple, 2003