Natalie Guy

On a research trip in July 2022 Natalie Guy visited Joanna Margaret Paul’s inspirational Stations of the Cross at St Mary Star of the Sea in Port Chalmers. Paul’s bright vibrant renditions of the stations were pained fresco like directly into their white plaster niches in 1971. Rarely seen as they are normally covered with traditional print versions of the stations, which has helped conserve them in pristine condition, Paul’s stations worked with deep purples, bright yellows and black and white, are a departure from the domestic paintings for which she is most renown. Responding to the interior to the architecture and the bright stained glass of the chapel, she tells the story of the stations in bold unmodulated forms. As Gregory O’Brien perceptively writes in A Living Response; “The choreography of empty space was one of Joanna’s great and defining skills as a painter. The Stations are a case in point. Therein the faces of her subjects are left white, their emptiness a kind of translucence – a tabula rasa, even . . . By concentrating colour in the space between and around the figures, she highlights the points of interaction, contact and separation. Her Stations are an honouring of these spaces as they are of the emblematic figures of religious faith. (https://landfallreview.com/a-living-response/)

Inspired by Paul’s Stations in the Star of the Sea Chapel, Natalie has now produced six freestanding sculptures referencing six specific stations. Titled: Judging, Falling, Carrying. Soothing, Mourning and Returning. The freestanding metal sculptures echo the bright opacity of the stations and define shape and space while incorporating negative (white) space and translucency. Translating Paul's paintings to sculptural form “Guy considers the meditated or framed view, through which she approaches the compositional definitions in the Stations. She chimes with Paul’s peculiar colour symbolism, creating cut-out shapes to reference the figures. Literal windows in Guy’s sculptural pieces echo Paul’s mediated view: the hinged doors and windows in the poem, and the formal framings of the Stations.

Joanna Osbourne