Set of seven lithographs, lithograph/woodcut on Velin Arches
42 x 30 cm (each)
47.4 x 35 x 2.5 cm (each, framed)


John Pule (b. 1962) is a Neiuan artist, novelist and poet. Since the beginning of his professional career, his literary and artistic practices have developed steadily alongside each other; his first novel, The Shark that Ate the Sun (Ko E Mago Ne Kai E La), was published in 1992 and his exhibition history dates back to the start of the 1990s. As a result, his work is now known and held in museums and galleries across New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the US, the Pacific and Asia.
Form and process play a key role in Pule’s practice. After visiting Nieu for the first time as an adult in 1991, he began to draw on Polynesian traditions and antiquated art forms. He is best known for paintings inspired by the tradition of hiapo, or Nieuan tapa, a nineteenth century art form that used bark-cloth as a canvas for elaborate paintings detailing the encounters of Neiuan people with European colonizers. As the New Zealand poet Gregory O’Brien has noted, Pule’s own work not only adopts the materiality and techniques of hiapo, but also its incentive toward image-making, memorializing and cultural self-reflexivity, modes which characterize both the artist’s literary and visual practices. Indeed, poetry was an early influence on Pule growing up as a teenager. He has cited his experience of reading the work of Romantics such as Keats and Shelley as foundational in kickstarting his own experiments in writing, the influence of whom remains evident in works such as The Bond of Time, an epic love poem originally published in 1985.[1]
Frequently, the parallel tracks of his career combine in mixed media works like Love Poems Set (2002), taken from his 100 Love Poems series, where his words find visual expression in illustrations that expand on the characters and themes contained in the poem’s stanzas. Often these address issues relating to the history, mythology, religious practices, colonization, and contemporary experience of the Pacific, whilst also drawing on feelings of alienation and belonging associated with the personal and familial experiences of Pule’s migration to New Zealand in 1964, at the age of two. The Romantic undertones of Pule’s work contribute to an exploration of Polynesia that combines objective facts about its history with subjective elements of his own postcolonial perspective of its contemporary reality. Dealing with the specifics of his positionality, Pule has also said that his works “reflect the unsettling agenda of governments that offer only insecurity and fear…” He says: “All of the elements in my work derive from my background — I am an artist making images and text that describe the uncertainties of our time.”[2] He is widely regarded as one of the Pacific’s most significant artists working today. – Elsa Gray
 
 
[1] Gregory O’Brien speaking in “Poetry with Greg O’Brien: John Pule,” Radio New Zealand (RNZ), New Zealand, May 3, 2014. Available at https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2594592/poetry-with-greg-o%27brien-john-pule.
[2] Quoted from article by Ashley Crawford, available at https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/life-as-seen-by-a-south-pacific-man-20071025-ge64rg.html.