Born in Hamilton in 1945, Paul was the eldest child of booksellers and publishers Blackwood and Janet Paul. She received a BA from the University of Auckland in 1968, and a DipFA in 1969. Moving to Port Chalmers in 1970, she married painter Jeffrey Harris, and they had four children. Their daughter Imogen died in 1976, only ten months old. She became the subject of some of Paul's most moving art works and poems.

Paul worked across a range of media, including drawing and painting, photography and film, and poetry. Encompassing landscape, still life, portraiture, her works responded to her immediate surroundings and everyday life. Documenting a meal, an encounter, or a season, they read like a visual diary. Paul said she was 'aggressively in support of the minor—I like my work to relate to a room rather than a gallery’.

In 1984, Paul received the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. Later, she moved to Whanganui, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. She had strong associations with Wellington as a sometime resident and regular visitor, and as the recipient of the 1993 Rita Angus artist's residency. Her work was included in Alter/Image in 1993 and The Figured Landscape in 1995.

Paul once described painting as ‘not a job, not even a vocation. It is part of life, subject to the strains, and joys, of domestic life.’

Round Otago Exhibition - a sequence of landscape painting , 1-11 August 1978 verso
Boshard Galleries, Dunedin