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John Pule2004 Laureate
Visual Artist and Poet
A performance poet and artist, John Pule is largely self-taught and leads a double career as a visual artist and writer.
Born in the village of Liku, Niue in 1962, John moved to New Zealand with his family in 1964.
He began writing in 1980 after reading the works of New Zealand poets and has since published two novels: The Shark That Ate The Sun (1992), Burn My Head In Heaven (1998); and four books of poems: Sonnets to Van Gogh (1983), Flowers After The Sun (1984), The Bond of Time (1998) and Tagata Kapakiloi (2004).
John has exhibited his paintings and taken part in many performance/poetry readings in the Pacific: Niue, Fiji, Rarotonga, Hawaii, Tonga, Rotuma and Solomon Islands.
He began painting in 1987 and exhibiting in 1989, participating in the first important exhibitions to showcase Pacific Island art - Te Moemoea No Iotefa (1990) and Bottled Ocean (1994). He participated at international art biennales in Johannesburg (1995), Kwangju (1995), Asia Pacific Triennial (1996 and 2002), Paradise Now! (2004), South Pacific Arts Festival (Western Samoa 1996, New Caledonia 2000, Palau 2004).
Other recent group exhibitions include the Future Tense: Security and Human Rights, Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, 2005; Te Moananui a Kiwa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland 2005; News From Islands, Campbelltown Gallery, Sydney 2006; The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Tribute, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland 2006; Turbulence: The Third Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, 2007 and Dateline: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany, 2008.
John Pule’s many solo exhibitions are in essence narratives of history and place, as are his novels and poetry. All are extensions to an on-going project to record his family history into an Aotearoa and Pacific context, combining elements of poetry, prose, drawing, printmaking and painting to maintain his routes/roots to the Pacific.
Recent solo exhibitions include 2007 Recent paintings, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne,
2006; Niniko Lalolagi – Dazzling Worlds, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, 2004; John Pule, Galerie Römerapotheke, Zurich, 2005 and Another Green World, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, 2006.
In 2003, Pule was artist in residence at the Cultural Museum, Rarotonga. John held the Romerapotheke Art Residency, Basel in 2005.
What is perhaps most remarkable about John’s paintings, is their fusion of cosmology, cartography, biography and corporeality. Peter Simpson has observed that “in his fiction he adopts techniques which are loosely but suggestively analogous to his paintings… that his work in whatever medium contributes to a multiple but unified project: it is his impassioned vocation to record his family stories”. (Landfall, Spring 1998, p.316).
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