This substantial, well-illustrated and comprehensive book (224 pages) accompanies an important retrospective exhibition of Joanna Margaret Paul’s work showing at Dunedin Public Art Gallery until 14 November. Later it will be shown at Christchurch Art Gallery and at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, which partnered with Dunedin to mount the exhibition.

Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) was a talented practitioner in many media and genres – painting, drawing, photography, film, poetry – all of which are represented in the exhibition and discussed in this book. Never a showy or self-promoting figure, Paul’s reputation has grown steadily during the years, especially since her untimely and accidental death in Rotorua aged 58 in 2003. A succession of subsequent exhibitions and publications has made her refined and accessible work ever more widely known, a process which reaches its culmination in this welcome exhibition and publication.

Several writers have contributed essays to the book. Paul’s youngest child, Pascal Harris, introduces the theme of Paul’s love for domestic environments and objects that is a recurrent theme throughout her life and art: “She would endlessly draw and paint household objects, vases with or without flowers, jugs, bowls, the sugar bowl, a wine glass.” One important series from late in her career entitled the sublunary wardrobe documents in a series of 11 exquisite small circular paintings (tondos), the clothes hanging in her wardrobe and other personal objects, a series that becomes progressively more symbolic and spiritual as it advances – the transition from the mundane to the transcendent world being a constant theme of her art.

The arrangement of the book is that each of six essays (all illustrated with photographs and reproductions) is followed by a section of plates. An essay entitled from hearth to horizon: the vantage point of Joanna Margaret Paul by Lauren Gutsell (one of the curators), offers an overview of Paul’s career from her beginnings in Hamilton, where she was the eldest child of Blackwood and Janet Paul who were well known as booksellers and publishers and (in Janet’s case) as an artist. Gutsell continues through to Paul’s art school days in Auckland, periods in the ’70s and ’80s in Dunedin where she married painter Jeffrey Harris and had four children (one of whom tragically died in infancy) to time spent at Barry’s Bay on Banks Peninsula and to eventually returning to the North Island, settling in Whanganui in 1985. The 30 page plate section (one of six) offers a miscellany of works – drawings, paintings, photographs, stills from films – documenting these phases of her work.

A second essay, the garden suburb and beyond, by Greg Donson, a curator from the Sarjeant Gallery, covers the years in Whanganui from 1985 to 2003, where Paul enthusiastically embraced the history and culture of the provincial city, involving herself in various heritage and conservation projects as well as continuing to add to her output of drawings and paintings.

Other chapters are more thematically or genre-focused. Curator Lucy Hammonds’ essay entitled Joanna Margaret Paul: the all purpose room focusses on Paul’s love of the interiors of houses and on landscape views seen through windows: the “border between inside and out,” as she puts it. Hammonds also makes useful comparisons between Paul’s work and other idiosyncratic New Zealand artists such as Frances Hodgkins and T.A. McCormack with whom she has close affinities. For example, just as Hodgkins entitled a work Self Portrait consisting entirely of personal objects, shoes and items of adornment, so Paul made works she called Self Portrait out of the plates and utensils on a kitchen bench. She succeeded in investing such earthly items of ordinary domestic life with a kind of sacramental ambience.

Paul’s pervasive spirituality – at various times of her life she embraced both Roman Catholicism and Quakerism – is the subject of an essay by Joanna Osborne, while her penchant for using words in her art is explored by Emma Bugden and her camera work in photography and film is examined by Andrea Bell. The book is also usefully provided with an extensive chronology and a bibliography.

For anyone not able to visit Dunedin or Whanganui to see the exhibition, this published tribute offers a most worthy and appealing substitute.