During the last decade of her life, artist and poet Joanna Margaret Paul would often travel from her home in Whanganui to draw, paint and photograph the landscape in Rotorua. This work is from a series she made depicting Mokoia, an island in the middle of Lake Rotorua, viewed through the trunks and branches of slender shoreline trees. Paul described her art as a “play between inner and outer events”, and this work’s sensitivity and quiet sincerity reflect the joy and solace she felt in nature. She wrote: “As a painter/ poet I sometimes feel like a sieve or fine skin on the natural world which presses through my consciousness.”

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)