John Pule's life and vision over 20 years

John Pule: Hauaga (Arrivals). 

The City Gallery, Wellington. 

Until Sept 12

Hauaga: The Art of John Pule

(Otago University Press), edited by Nicholas Thomas. RRP $120

This survey exhibition of John Pule’s works span 20 years since he began exhibiting in the 1990s.

One of the few major New Zealand artists who has had no formal training and little education, he developed his art as a way of explaining the world in which he felt isolated.

He was born in the village of Liku in Niue, and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of two in 1964, only returning to the island in 1991. Since then he has made a number of trips back home, developing his interest in the history and mythology of Niue.

He had a difficult early home life, and lack of interest in school led to wild behaviour, including burning down a school which led to him being put into care. However, in the late 1980s he had a few epiphanies and began to paint and write.

His early work of the 1990s (which should include his novel The Shark That Ate the Sun) shows him developing ways of understanding his environment, heritage and history.

The City Gallery show begins at this point with some of his early, simple, direct pieces which had been influenced by looking at traditional hiapo, a cloth beaten out of  mulberry bark, felted into rectangular sheets and then painted freehand within a grid-like pattern.

Among these early works are “Mafola” (1991) in which we can see many of the images he would  continue to use; the figurative elements which often refer to Christian stories, Niuen patterns, abstracted natural images of plants and fish, obscure narratives and European art.

There are even images that will take on the cloud formations of his later work along with his intentional scumbling or blurring of images.

Other early works such as the “Pulenoa Triptych” (1995) included images which were essentially metaphors that combined the threads of the artists personal life,  the history and mythology of Nuie as well as the impact of Christianity on Niueans both  here and in New Zealand.

The elements he uses appear to create narratives or document the artist’s life but they mainly create a new mythology. The readings of these works become personal to the individual viewer with the collection of images acting as an aide memoire in creating our own explorations and histories.

The use of the symbols is something like the way we view hieroglyphics; individually they are simplistic but assembling the various images creates the idea of an extended narrative or a collection of voices.

The influence of Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere can be seen in his work partly in the way he includes words, often taken from his own writings.  Like McCahon, he uses the ideas and images of religion to deal with wider social and political issues, but not because of a religious belief but that they provide a useful set of images with which to tell stories and make comments.

Another influence appears to be aboriginal art with works like “Clear the Pathway to walk on” (1999) where he uses the long strips of colour and pattern employed by aboriginal artists. These paintings are also are akin to the work of Shane Cotton, who used a similar layered landscape approach that also included a story-telling element.

Over the past 20 years Pule has created his own set of geometric motifs and figurative elements. Some of them come from the Niuean hiapo, some from Pacific traditions while others are from European and Maori sources.

With all of them he has made adaptations and transformations in much the way that many contemporary artists appropreite other works of art. In the end, however, they are all filtered through the artist's own imagination.

Over the years one can see the development of the work from the early grid formations, which often contained a single image through to the  more recent grid approach.

This is more complex and now includes what could be read as black and white aerial landscapes, as in the case of  “The Splendid Land” (2009), which looks like Taranaki.

The exhibition also includes several of his works where he uses poetry.  These are  political works, written in both English and the Niuean language, allowing him to further express his ideas. 

The set of lithographs “Restless Spirit” (2000)  with texts from The Shark That Ate the Sun is like medieval illustrated manuscripts combining words and illustrations. These works read like a cross between a set biblical quotations and private diary entries.

My Father died a bitter man

Our family

State house was burned to the ground on

Easter weekend eighteen years ago.

Large recent works such as “Another Green World” have coloured clouds that could be celestial or nuclear. They hover over landscapes full of human and mythological activity. Much of the imagery revolves around war and destruction and the blight of religion.

The largest of these take on some of the characteristics of the giant altarpieces of Medieval and Renaissance Europe and are attempts to cope with big issues and concepts.

As in all his works, Pule is dealing with ideas of metamorphosis and duality, of both a physical presence as well as another dimension. The images inhabit these canvasses in a more obvious way than they have in the past and are cinematic rather than individual snapshots.

These works abound with the conflicting notions of love and loss, love and lust, myth and reality, suffering and redemption.

Hauaga has been published to coincide with the survey exhibition and provides an indispensable guide to the work of one of the most powerful and original artists of the new Oceania.

This is the first book to deal with John Pule’s art. It ranges over his drawing, print-making and writing – he is the author of two novels and several books of poetry – as well as his painting.

Essays by Gregory O’Brien, Peter Brunt, and Nicholas Thomas provide several routes into Pule’s engaging and compelling works, considering his formation as a writer and artist, his meditations on life and loss, and the extraordinary architecture of his visual art.

John Pule speaks himself, through an extended interview, and in a series of extracts from his poetry and prose.