Dunedin holds good memories for Pascal Harris so it is fitting it is here he is holding a special exhibition of his mother's work. Rebecca Fox talks to Pascal about joining his mother in the exhibition.
Walking into the room where his mother's artworks are stored is an intense experience for Pascal Harris.
Thirteen years ago, his mother, Joanna Paul, died after collapsing in a thermal pool in Rotorua. She was only 57, and left behind some 5000 artworks. She was well known for her small drawings but also worked in oils and watercolours, wrote poetry and made films.
Paul's work is receiving significant attention from a contemporary audience, who recognise the authenticity and innovation of her work and its power in the present day, Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds said.
Her work of the 1970s, in particular, was intensely connected to her immediate world - responding to and recording her day-to-day activities living in Dunedin (and elsewhere) as a young mother and an artist.
‘‘These works take a path through great joys and sorrows, all anchored within her own domestic experience and the objects that surround her.''
A pianist and photographer, Mr Harris had always wanted to reconnect with this mother's work.
‘‘For a long time I felt too close to the subject. It has been good to get some distance.''
Only 20 years old when she died, Mr Harris has been travelling for years, spending time in London and then six years in Japan.
He returned to New Zealand and settled in Dunedin 18 months ago.
The city has family connections and good memories; his mother had lived in the city in the early 1970s and married his father, artist Jeffrey Harris, here.
They returned in 1977 when Harris was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.
After their marriage ended in 1984, Paul travelled with her three children to Wellington before finally settling in Wanganui.
In 1996, Paul returned to Dunedin for a year with sons Felix and Pascal to take up the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.
‘‘It was a happy year for me. There was a question over whether we would stay or go back. I would have liked to stay. I wonder what things would have been like if we had stayed,'' Mr Harris said.
‘‘For me, at that time, I thought she knew everything. I looked up to her a lot. She was very kind and gentle and never raised her voice.''
He admitted there were a lot of tough times growing up but by the time he was a teenager things had ‘‘calmed down'' a lot.
‘‘I went to a dozen different schools but I found it exciting moving to different places.''
Instead, Paul returned with Pascal to Wanganui while Felix lived with an aunt in Wellington.
Settling back in Dunedin, he began to think again about putting on an exhibition of his mother's work, selected by himself.
He knew the Brett McDowell Gallery had held exhibitions of his mother's work in the past, as had the Hocken Library and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
So he approached Brett McDowell with his idea of doing an exhibition and later they came up with the project of making a book to accompany the exhibition for which Mr Harris would write a piece about his mother, along with reproductions of some of her work that would be shown.
Visiting the storage space where his mother's works were held, ‘‘some works cried out to me to be shown, others struck me by their beauty''.
Some of the selected works had not been exhibited before or had been in the 1980s.
‘‘I think they show a side of her that has not been represented enough.''
While well known for her smaller, delicate drawings, often inspired by domestic life, she had painted many larger canvases.
‘‘The idea of the exhibition giving her work new life is in a way very exciting.''
Composing what he was going to say to accompany the exhibition had been challenging and emotional.
‘‘It's been like spending time with my mother by writing about her.''
The writings were part personal memories and part his own journey since she had died.
‘‘There were a lot of things I'd have liked to talk to her about. It's bringing two sides together, my memories and a conversation with her.''
The varied nature of his own work echoes that of his mother, he said.
As a pianist, he taught and performed as well as performed solo, combining that with taking photographs and some writing.
‘‘I'm similar to my mother in that way. My work is like a diary of personal reflections, a way of living and seeing.
‘‘Her openness and awareness of the beauty in the world, I share. I'm grateful for that openness.''
His mother also came from an artistic family. Her parents were pioneering publishers Janet and Blackwood Paul and she grew up in Hamilton with a mother who painted and books were everywhere.
‘‘There were always a lot of artistic people in the house. Art was a natural thing for her.''
However, she was sent to a boarding school in Wellington where she was very unhappy. Paul went on to the University of Waikato where she studied French, history and English.
In 1964, she travelled with her family to London, studying figure drawing and painting at the Sir John Cass School.
On her return from England, she completed an arts degree from Auckland University and then enrolled at Elam School of Fine Arts, where she studied under teachers such as Colin McCahon.
In the late 1960s, she held her first exhibition, a show of 107 drawings, at the Hamilton Art Gallery.
It was after this she settled in Port Chalmers and made ‘‘lots of little drawings showing my love of Port Chalmers - its hill vistas and bright green houses against the sea'', she is reported as saying in Joanna Margaret Paul: Drawing by Jill Trevelyan and Sarah Treadwell.
The only major survey of her work in her lifetime was shown in the Sarjeant Gallery in 1989.
Paul is described as having a keen social conscience, and was an environmentalist as well as being modest, self-effacing and very frugal in the kitchen.
His mother did not like self-promotion, and Mr Harris was reluctant to feature in the Otago Daily Times.
As Peter Ireland in Art New Zealand said in her obituary, Paul worked for ‘‘love not money, neither for status nor fame''.
‘‘And so during her public life as an artist - just on 34 years - Paul existed on the margins of the art world.''
Mr Ireland emphasised how she suffered for choosing many different art forms to express herself in a world where this was seen as a lack of focus.
‘‘Self-promotion - the grease of an upwardly mobile career - was anathema ... This intransigence may have imposed limitations on her life, but it did no harm to her work.''
‘‘Light on Things'' was the fourth exhibition the Brett McDowell Gallery had held of Paul's work since 2009. Each show had been mounted with the assistance of her sisters and children, who represent Paul's estate.
Paul's work is also on show at Dunedin Public Art Gallery until June 6 as part of New Zealand-born, Scottish-based Kate Davis' exhibition ‘‘The Unswept Floor''.
Davis' work, like Paul's, references domestic life. The works on display are a pencil drawing from the gallery's collection, a self-portrait from the Hocken Library and a film, Task, borrowed from Circuit Gallery.
To see
Joanna Margaret Paul, ‘‘Light on Things'', Brett McDowell Gallery until April 7.
Artist also has works in ‘‘Kate Davis, The Unswept Floor'' at Dunedin Public Art Gallery until June 6.
‘From Light and Things' excerpts
‘‘In their physical being, things have emotion contained inside them.
This is a view I came to have through living in Japan.
Without consciously trying to understand or find out about their philosophy,I simply absorbed it as if by osmosis - like a sponge. This spiritual quality in things is something my mother came to as well.
Something which led her to relate to the mystics.
The thingness of things.
She reaches deep into what makes a thing a thing.
She grasps the divinity of the nature of objects,animate and inanimate.''
- Pascal Harris
‘‘In Japan, I lived next to a river lined with large cherry trees.
When they blossomed the surroundings were transformed.
It became a paradise. The flowers had a beauty about them that was not of this world.
Walking outside I would feel like I was floating. When I came back to Dunedin I came across my mother's works in storage.
With her drawings as hymns to the beauty of the cherry.
She more often draws the bark of the tree and its markingsthan the blossoms whose intangibility she suggests by leaving a white space.
The cherry now. She calls her series.
The cherry is the symbol of nowness.
The eternal present.''
- Pascal Harris
