Otago Harbour (1978) is a work on paper by Joanna Margaret Paul in the Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, Dunedin. It is just over half a metre high, under a metre wide, in pencil and acrylic paint, with pasted-on paper carrying additional drawn and printed imagery. These various methods of representing show the different ways Paul connected to, and experienced, her environment—conceptually, corporeally and emotionally. Insofar as it draws attention to the act of documenting and making, as much as the ostensible subject, Otago Harbour is a sophisticated and significant work in the context of New Zealand art in 1978, and rewards extended analysis. This article is a start.
Joanna Margaret Paul first lived in Dunedin in 1970, in Port Chalmers, having completed her Diploma in Fine Arts at Elam, Auckland, the previous year. Her paintings did not yet have a distinctive character; merely New Zealandish and abstractish, with a dose of Colin McCahon evident in the breaking up of a scene into scrubbily-painted areas.
Paul married Jeffrey Harris in 1971 and they moved to Seacliff, north of Dunedin, where she made pastels and oils of the east coast landscape in long panoramic slices—vigorous seas and skies, leaning buildings and wonky fences, everything a little windswept and bent about. Paul and Harris moved north again to Banks Peninsula, and then in 1977, the marriage a little frayed,, Paul was living in Eglinton Road, Mornington.
