An early commission by one of NZ’s most highly regarded artists lies hidden in obscurity amid a row over traditional and modern art in a religious context.
They glow with a spare luminosity. Simple, black-edged figures leaning into each other in sorrow and compassion; saturated colours interjected by the unforgiving lines of a cross, the shocking silence of white space.
“When you remove the blinds, brilliant colours rush into the consecrated space,” wrote poet Bernadette Hall on first seeing the Stations of the Cross painted by artist, poet, experimental film-maker and photographer Joanna Margaret Paul on the white plaster walls of St Mary, Star of the Sea in Dunedin’s Port Chalmers in 1971. “It fills with light. Your heart lifts. You are connected to the hills, the harbour, the very human story of suffering and sacrifice.”
But viewing this very human story is not easy. Visiting the small, light-filled church perched above the glittering waters of Port Chalmers, it is impossible to miss the town’s maritime history. There’s a weathered ship’s wheel, a ship’s bell, a porthole covering the baptismal font, a retired anchor supporting the lectern. But for most of the year, even at this time of year, Paul’s Stations of the Cross lie hidden by Hall’s “blinds” – a series of Renaissance reproductions rescued, according to the many conflicting stories milling around these works, from beneath the church or from a retired church north of Dunedin.
As Hall says, “It’s a long and convoluted story. Much papal silentio surrounds it.”
Joanna Margaret Paul, the subject of the major touring retrospective Imagined in the Context of a Room developed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, grew up in Hamilton, the eldest of four daughters of well-known artistic and literary parents Janet and Blackwood Paul.
She studied history, English and French at the University of Waikato before spending a year in Europe and London where she learnt painting and figure drawing. Back in New Zealand, she completed first a bachelor of arts degree then a diploma in fine arts at the University of Auckland.
In 1970, she followed her younger sister, Charlotte, to Dunedin. As she wrote in her unpublished memoir Rooms and Episodes, “I rented a lean-to flat behind a house in Currie St, Port Chalmers. There was happiness in solitude & simplicity, a small yard with silverbeet, the red bathroom & the doors that I painted deep yellow.”
She worked prolifically, producing “lots of little drawings showing my love of Port Chalmers ‒ its hill vistas & bright green houses against the sea”.
By this time, while still in her early 20s, she had converted to Catholicism. As Charlotte says, “She had a religious ardour, which was a constant, really.” She befriended local priest Father Kevin Kean. She cooked for him. They shared meals. In 1971, he commissioned her to paint the Stations of the Cross on the plaster niches in the church. Traditionally a series of 14 works, they depict the journey of Christ from trial to crucifixion (in the late 70s, Pope John Paul II urged the addition of a 15th station, the resurrection). Of her 14 paintings, Paul wrote, “Bright beautiful simple even childish images with a consciously symbolic use of colour.”
Parishioner opposition
The works, with their flat compositions, McCahon-like simplicity and glowing humanity, have been admired by art historians, critics and worshippers. At least some worshippers. As Paul went on to write, “The parishioners did not like them.”
By the mid-1970s, the works seemed to have disappeared, replaced by a set of unremarkable reproductions and an ongoing rumble of conjecture and uncertainty. Had they been painted over? Had the new priest – Father Kean had by this time moved on – simply “hated” the works? Had angry parishioners demanded they be covered up? After all, an information leaflet for visitors to the church makes no mention of them.
By this time, Paul had married painter Jeffrey Harris (in that same church) and moved first to Seacliff, then Wellington, then Banks Peninsula. In 1977, they moved back to Dunedin to take up the Frances Hodgkins fellowship – Harris in 1977 and Paul in 1983.
The following year, her marriage ended, and Paul moved back north, eventually settling in Whanganui. In 2003, within months of marrying architect Peter Harrison, she died from the fumes of a thermal pool.
Throughout her life, Paul developed a reputation as an accomplished and innovative artist and poet working quietly on the margins of the art world, building her art from a place of everyday domesticity and her religious faith.
“This notion of the margins is a place where she enjoyed working,” says Lucy Hammonds, Dunedin Public Art Gallery senior curator and co-curator of the retrospective exhibition. “She sought out spaces that were in between different ways of working. She was multidisciplinary before that was a mode of working – that has a lot to do with why a contemporary generation of artists working in that cross-disciplinary way really started to find connection with her work,” says Hammonds.
“But on the other hand, you have an artist who had a successful and longstanding career in a whole lot of different fields. That is the emphasis of the exhibition, to pull all those threads together and remind people that, actually, she wasn’t working in obscurity by any stretch of the imagination. You can look at Joanna’s career and see a well-read, well-educated, thoughtful and experienced woman artist who knows her context, has a consistent exhibition history, receives residencies and supports herself as an artist as well as a writer.”
Yet one of her earliest commissions lies hidden in obscurity.
According to Father Mark Chamberlain, parish priest for the pastoral area that includes Port Chalmers, Kean had invited Paul to paint the Stations in the Port Chalmers church “out of respect for her artwork but also out of friendship”. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t consult the local community and “people felt kind of hurt that he wasn’t listening to them, which he wasn’t”.
In commissioning the new works for the Star of the Sea, he says, the existing three-dimensional Stations of the Cross, copied, he thinks, from an Italian form of the Stations and gifted to the church, had to be removed. Some were damaged.
“Then Joanna created her really colourful Stations where she really painted the colours of around the harbour, around the local context, and then used that as a means of conveying the Stations of the Cross of Jesus,” says Chamberlain. “At one level, it provided a very good opportunity for Joanna but I think in some ways it also placed her unwittingly between parishioners and the parish priest, who hadn’t consulted.”
He describes her works as “more abstract. People are confused. They don’t really know what station is meant to be each moment of the Stations of Jesus.”
Chamberlain says that, in about 1976, two parishioners procured the Renaissance prints from a church that was no longer in use. These were fitted to cover Paul’s works without damaging them. “The covering made sure we would hide Joanna’s work so people could see what they were familiar with and what they were used to, but at the same time, protect the artist’s work.”
In more recent years, there have been several “outings” of Paul’s Stations. They were on show for a service marking the first anniversary in 2014 of Ralph Hotere’s death, and later that year, to mark Paul’s birthday. In 2018, Hall, co-executor of Paul’s literary estate, curated a celebration of the Stations in association with the University of Otago’s Burns Fellowship 60th anniversary. This included readings of essays by writers Ian Wedde and Gregory O’Brien.
Both write eloquently of Paul’s Stations. They speak of humility, writes O’Brien, “innocence and – importantly – empathy”. It would be presumptuous, writes Wedde, “to associate the paintings’ simplicity with the simplicity of the artist’s beliefs, which were not doctrinaire. What comes across from the paintings is better described as sincerity – a straightforward transcription of belief, both personal and historical, and of the conditions of spiritual experience.”
Chamberlain says the paintings will continue to be publicly available.
“Usually in Advent, for about four weeks towards the end of the year, we uncover Joanna’s Stations so people can see them. Then occasionally, you might get a group that has a particular day in mind for Joanna and they ask if they can be made visible – they certainly can and we do.”
Calls for their permanent display continue, including from some local parishioners, but the majority of the Port Chalmers community “still favour the ones that are covering them, the traditional Stations of the Cross”, he says.
And the hurt from over half a century ago apparently still lingers.
“People react strongly when they are not consulted,” says Chamberlain. “They have a sense that this is our place, then someone has come in and destroyed what was important to them and then, without asking them, again imposed this other form of art on top of them ... I don’t think that issue has gone away.”
In a bind
The Catholic Church tradition of commissioning contemporary art began in the Renaissance. As did protests. In 2005, parishioners at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Christchurch waved placards over the naked figure of Christ featured in the panels of the Stations sculpted by the late Llew Summers (Summers gave way, adding a removable plaster loincloth).
Today, the small granite and Ōamaru stone church in Port Chalmers is caught between the art world’s enthusiasm for the work, says Chamberlain, “and a prayerful Catholic community for whom this is not a matter of art, but of prayerful reflection on the life of Jesus.
“I am fine with the works and I am keen that they be preserved and for them to be shared and visible for people when they want that to be. But I’m also keen the Stations that are more easily identifiable for some people and assist their prayer and devotion are also available.”
Will this community ever come to see the beauty of these works? “Possibly. Sometimes some parishioners do see them and appreciate them. Other times, people have quite a strong reaction the other way. If there was ever a time when the church was no longer used for what it was built for – it’s such a lovely building I’m sure the local historical society and others would make sure the church itself was not destroyed and it was a place people could visit – then Joanna’s work would be part of it,” Chamberlain says.
For Charlotte Paul – raised with Joanna in a Protestant family and an eminent epidemiologist – knowing her sister’s Stations have not been painted over was a “great discovery”.
And like many others she is keen to see them displayed permanently. “The church looks absolutely beautiful with them revealed and they are very fitting in colour and style with the church. It seems almost bigger than the parish. If you attend an old church in England and you don’t like a particular image or object, you accept it as part of the church. To let everything depend on what some parishioners at any particular time want seems a sad thing.”
In the meantime, Paul’s Stations remain in their dim sanctuaries. They have been professionally cleaned and photographed by Dunedin Public Art Gallery staff; their tempera surfaces are at least protected from damaging light. As Lucy Hammonds says, “The solution the church has come to is as good an outcome as you could hope for, aside from the works being on display.”
One of the gallery’s goals now, she says, is to build a sense within that community of pride and the importance of that cycle of paintings to art history. “Hopefully, people will come to love them like we do.”