Not Nostalgia

Not nostalgia: this is the title of a recent exhibition by Joanna Margaret Paul at Bowerbank Ninow in Auckland. It comes from Paul’s essay, ‘A passionate pilgrimage in time’, in which she reflected on memory, history and architectural heritage. Rejecting an uncritical attitude towards the past, she urged a strategy of active engagement: ‘continuity . . . use . . . passion . . . dialogue . . . respect . . .’ She praised a work by Rosalie Gascoigne, which referred to the past in its salvaged materials: ‘It appealed to piecemeal memory by offering shards that swam together to form another whole.’ That phrase could just as readily apply to Paul’s practice. As a poet, painter, filmmaker and photographer, she focused attention on the fragment, the habitually overlooked. Like her great exemplars, Bonnard and Bresson, she found ‘richness in ordinary things’.

The works at Bowerbank Ninow, selected from the artist’s estate, had previously toured New Zealand in the exhibition , organised by Mahara Gallery in 2006. Most are landscapes and sketches of trees and plants recalling her profound identification with nature. Commenting on the macrocarpa trees outside her Okains Bay home of the 1970s, she wrote: ‘Night and day I regard the trees and when I look away they are stamped in me, and I like a clay mould carry their marks within.’ Paul once described herself as ‘a sieve or fine skin on the natural world’, and the sense of being acted upon, the world pressing in on her consciousness, is a constant motif in her writings. It is