Savage Island Hiapo, 2008
Photo: Courtesy the artist | Gow Langsford Gallery
Collection
Oils, enamels, oil stick, ink and varnish on canvas
Diptych; each panel 200 x 200 x 3.5 cm
John Pule (b. 1962) is a Nieuan artist, novelist and poet. Since 1980 he has experimented with written forms of poetry and prose, and in the late 1980s began an art practice rooted in painting, that has since expanded to include sculpture, film, video and performance. His work is concerned with the mythology, religions, history and colonisation of his birthplace of Niue, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific. After a period of experimentation his paintings gained their solid, now recognisable form in 1991 when Pule returned to Nieu for the first time as an adult, since his family migrated to New Zealand in 1964. There, he discovered and was inspired by forms of traditional craft and design that transformed his visual practice. The most significant of these was hiapo, or tapa cloth, that were originally printed with forms and patterns, and documented the experience of Nieuan people during the 19th century.
As the New Zealand writer Dave Eggleton wrote regarding the artist’s engagement with hiapo: “Pule’s innovation was to turn a craft-form into an art-form by using canvas as a substitute for bark cloth and then investing the visual field with a radically increased amount of symbolism.”[1] Indeed, the influence of hiapo on Pule was significant in determining the future form of his paintings, but was also developed by decision to blend its aesthetics with traditional materials like canvas, and further developed by his depiction of contemporary subject matter and critical consideration of the impact of colonialism and missionary presence on hiapo production. His engagement with the history of hiapo takes into account the process and cultural ramifications of their possession, destruction and misinterpretation by European colonial powers, and in many ways seeks to reestablish their status as aesthetic and cultural objects following their forced occupation as ethnographic objects in colonial and museological regimes of display and classification.
Savage Island Hiapo (2008) takes its name from the designation of Nieu as ‘Savage Island’ by Captain James Cook in 1774 following his failure to alight ship in the face of opposition from the Nieuan people. By referencing Cook’s nomenclature Pule calls attention to the long history of British Imperial Rule in Polynesia, whilst also pointing to the forms of resistance employed by indigenous people in the face of colonial force. In this way, the title of the work is representative of Pule’s regard for hiapo as a historical source. He has said, “I see hiapo as recording encounters with white people from Europe, and later, between expatriate New Zealanders and Niuean people. Hiapo materially embodies these relationships. Niuean hiapo have survived, stored in museums all over the world. When I see hiapo in storage, is it my history stored by another’s history? Are my mind, language, and my eyes incarcerated too?”[2] Through his Hiapo-influenced paintings, artist John Pule thus investigates the history of the Polynesian islands in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial terms, playing with the poetics and problematics of legibility and symbolism tied into the structure and operational history of hiapo to address current social, political and cultural concerns of Polynesia. – Elsa Gray
[1] David Eggleton, “John Pule and the Psychic Territory of Polynesia,” in Art New Zealand, 99, (Winter 2001). Available at https://www.art-newzealand.com/Issue99/Pule.htm.
[2] John Pule and Nicholas Thomas, Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth, (Otago: Otago University Press, 2015)
Diptych; each panel 200 x 200 x 3.5 cm
John Pule (b. 1962) is a Nieuan artist, novelist and poet. Since 1980 he has experimented with written forms of poetry and prose, and in the late 1980s began an art practice rooted in painting, that has since expanded to include sculpture, film, video and performance. His work is concerned with the mythology, religions, history and colonisation of his birthplace of Niue, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific. After a period of experimentation his paintings gained their solid, now recognisable form in 1991 when Pule returned to Nieu for the first time as an adult, since his family migrated to New Zealand in 1964. There, he discovered and was inspired by forms of traditional craft and design that transformed his visual practice. The most significant of these was hiapo, or tapa cloth, that were originally printed with forms and patterns, and documented the experience of Nieuan people during the 19th century.
As the New Zealand writer Dave Eggleton wrote regarding the artist’s engagement with hiapo: “Pule’s innovation was to turn a craft-form into an art-form by using canvas as a substitute for bark cloth and then investing the visual field with a radically increased amount of symbolism.”[1] Indeed, the influence of hiapo on Pule was significant in determining the future form of his paintings, but was also developed by decision to blend its aesthetics with traditional materials like canvas, and further developed by his depiction of contemporary subject matter and critical consideration of the impact of colonialism and missionary presence on hiapo production. His engagement with the history of hiapo takes into account the process and cultural ramifications of their possession, destruction and misinterpretation by European colonial powers, and in many ways seeks to reestablish their status as aesthetic and cultural objects following their forced occupation as ethnographic objects in colonial and museological regimes of display and classification.
Savage Island Hiapo (2008) takes its name from the designation of Nieu as ‘Savage Island’ by Captain James Cook in 1774 following his failure to alight ship in the face of opposition from the Nieuan people. By referencing Cook’s nomenclature Pule calls attention to the long history of British Imperial Rule in Polynesia, whilst also pointing to the forms of resistance employed by indigenous people in the face of colonial force. In this way, the title of the work is representative of Pule’s regard for hiapo as a historical source. He has said, “I see hiapo as recording encounters with white people from Europe, and later, between expatriate New Zealanders and Niuean people. Hiapo materially embodies these relationships. Niuean hiapo have survived, stored in museums all over the world. When I see hiapo in storage, is it my history stored by another’s history? Are my mind, language, and my eyes incarcerated too?”[2] Through his Hiapo-influenced paintings, artist John Pule thus investigates the history of the Polynesian islands in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial terms, playing with the poetics and problematics of legibility and symbolism tied into the structure and operational history of hiapo to address current social, political and cultural concerns of Polynesia. – Elsa Gray
[1] David Eggleton, “John Pule and the Psychic Territory of Polynesia,” in Art New Zealand, 99, (Winter 2001). Available at https://www.art-newzealand.com/Issue99/Pule.htm.
[2] John Pule and Nicholas Thomas, Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth, (Otago: Otago University Press, 2015)