Crosses to bear

An early commission by one of the country's most highly regarded artists lies hidden in obscurity amid a row over traditional and modern art in a religious context.

- SALLY BLUNDELL

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.