Exhibitions
Events
On display
Joanna Margaret Paul: Imagined in the context of a room
Joanna Margaret Paul Untitled, 22 Royal Terrace 1971. Acrylic on board. Private collection. Courtesy of Joanna Margaret Paul Estate
Talk
Past event
Meet in the exhibition
On the opening day of this exhibition, join Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds for a floortalk on this major retrospective celebrating the career and legacy of Joanna Margaret Paul.
Filmmaker, poet, artist and photographer Joanna Margaret Paul (1945–2003) made quietly observational yet radical work during her lifetime, reflecting on motherhood, domestic life, and the dichotomy between urban spaces and the natural world.
Imagined in the context of a room presents a close study of her career from the 1970s to the 2000s and is accompanied by a significant publication. Moving across the different phases of Paul’s life as an artist, the exhibition traces key journeys that shaped her career: from Ōtepoti Dunedin to Te Pātaka-o-Rākaihautū Banks Peninsula, Whanganui and beyond; between the landscape and the interior; the mind, body and spirit; between presence and absence.
Developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery with project partner Sarjeant Art Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui.
Related reading: Talk
Exhibition
Joanna Margaret Paul: Imagined in the Context of a Room
4 December 2021 – 6 March 2022
A major retrospective celebrating the career and legacy of Joanna Margaret Paul.
Collection
Nova Paul Still Light
Commissioned as a response to an untitled poem by artist Joanna Margaret Paul, Nova Paul’s Still Light is a reflection on the domestic and intimate. Shot in 16mm film, the camera traces around objects and follows light shifting across domestic surfaces, creating fluctuations in colour and flickering shadow. A fittingly tender soundtrack is provided by Nova’s friend and sometime collaborator Bic Runga.
The room is close with mystery this morning heavy green folds of velvet curtain are patterned with light the sky breaks in panes of almost blue & casts a white mirage upon the ceiling mirror filled with things the white dove-cote outhouse received from another window with its dark apertures a mound of sunlit ivy a light blue room caught, held in the round lid of some vessel open on the dressing table. Or so the room seems to be heavy & punctuated with mystery in the early stillness & I would drift out & put on the room, the day a close & heavy garment for my pregnancy, but the obdurate shape by my side prevents my peaceful mingling with the folded curtain & the light the mirror the window the pale day… Excerpt from untitled poem by Joanna Margaret Paul Like Love Poems: Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2006
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Joanna Margaret Paul Barrys Bay: Interior with Bed and Doll
“Through the shaped spaces of the bed’s frame; through the flowers carved in the wood and through the window pane; through the pierced verandah hood, the foliate rose, I see the straight and curved branches parting of a tree. Without the lens heaven, the heavens not understood. Thus domestic life is both subject and metaphor.”
“As a woman, painting is not a job, not even a vocation. It is part of life, subject to the strains, and joys, of domestic life. I cannot paint unless the house is in order. Unless I paint I don’t function well in my domestic roles. Each thing is important. The idea that one sacrifices other values for art is alien to me, and I think to all women whose calling it is to do and be many things. To concentrate all meaning and all energy in a work of art is to leave life dry and banal. I don’t wish to separate the significant and everyday actions but to bring them to close as possible.” —Joanna Margaret Paul, 1975
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
