Through a Different Lens: Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul
Introduced by Peter Todd
Drawing comparisons with the Orcadian filmmaker Margaret Tait, New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul (1955-2003) worked prolifically across film, poetry and painting. Her film work chronicles motherhood and domestic life, urban settlement and the persistent presence of the natural world.
Curated by artist Peter Todd, this is the first collection to make Paul’s work available to an international audience. Its 13 works, all silent, were shot in the 1970s on 8mm and 16mm film and subsequently transferred to HD video.
‘Paul’s films were made in relative artistic isolation from avant-garde film discourse in the mid-1970s, but are rooted in an acute feminist politics that focuses on concerns of shared female social spaces and everyday domestic situations.’ —Frieze
Linked screening: Peter Todd will introduce a screening of his own work the following evening, Friday 29 June, at the Star & Shadow Cinema.
Films
Children — Imogen
Port Chalmers Cycle
Writing
Through a Different Lens: Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul
Motifs return in her films or what she has filmed. They become motifs through accumulation. A way that is perhaps both a becoming familiar-with, getting one’s bearings, and just being. Read more
About the curator
Peter Todd is a film-maker and curator based in London. He was co-editor of Subjects & Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (LUX, 2004), which gathered together new essays on Orcadian film-poet Margaret Tait’s work, interviews, reprints of key poems, a story and texts as well as a detailed filmography, a chronology, a bibliography, and resources. Peter Todd currently works for the British Film Institute.