Joanna Margaret Paul (1955–2003) was a New Zealand artist who pioneered interdisciplinary practice, working prolifically across the mediums of film, poetry and painting. Often shot and edited in-camera, her film work chronicled motherhood and domestic life, the worn traces of urban settlement, and the persistent presence of the natural world.
Thorndon (1975) depicts her home near the Bolton Street Cemetery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and contrasts the half-constructed shapes and incursions of urban planning with intimate details of domestic architecture—houses glimpsed in the gaps between buildings, reflections in windows, sunlight leaking from a cracked fence. A moment in time caught in the saturated hues and oblique framing of 8mm film, the city is presented as a series of dissected spaces, as cranes dividing the sky construct the motorway that required the exhumation of around 3,700 burials.
