Thorndon

Original format: 8 mm

‘When my work is all laid out together, the jigsaw puzzle of my life will show itself, I think… It’s oblique, but it’s all there’ – Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) quoted by Jill Trevelyan.

Artist and filmmaker Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) created a rigorous body of work in New Zealand, defined by its observational style as much as her exacting compositions. Moving between painting, film, photography and poetry, her work has become increasingly influential to new generations of artists in New Zealand, representing a defiant and highly personal aesthetic. Her largely silent films dissect domestic space, framing her lived environments through series of frames, filming through windows, doorways and alleys, she fractures space to amplify details and intimate gestures. Her films function as fractured portraits, to be pieced together across her body of work, seen now they are remarkable records of a re-ceeding world. Her film Thorndon freely charts the interlocking spaces, buildings and byways of one of the oldest regions in the capital city of Wellington, framed by the spectre of imminent redevelopment.

Photo: Joanna Margaret Paul, Thorndon (1975). Courtesy The Estate of Joanna Margaret Paul, CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington.