John Puhiatau Pule was born in 1962 in the village of Liku,
Niue. He was brought to New Zealand by his mother when he was 3
years old and grew up in Auckland, New Zealand.
Encouraged by Tony Fomison, Pule's painterly career began in a
form of Expressionism before evolving in the early 1990's into the
unique and engaging style that has defined his work over the last
15 years.
Pule combines elements of his Niuean heritage with facets of
Christian New Zealand culture using a vocabulary of iconographic
and symbolic emblems. While his early works may loosely resemble
Niuean hiapo (bark cloth), it is the sense of narrative
that plays a defining role in his pictorial work (as it is in his
poetry and writing - Pule is a celebrated New Zealand novelist and
poet), articulating questions about cultural translocation and the
subsequent sense of dislocation: the question of what it is for
individuals from one culture to be transplanted into
another.
Over time, Pule's style of painting and lithography has evolved
from compositions greatly influenced by storytelling and often
rendered in largely sepia tones (drawn from the colour range of
Niuean hiapo - but with the added effect of exacerbating
the nostalgic sense of Pule's themes). Later work exhibits a
greater sense of abstraction that - while still retaining its
literary links - focuses more on the process of painting, the
effervescence of colour and the compositional attributes of visual,
rather than literary expression.
Pule has exhibited extensively, both nationally and
internationally, since his debut show in 1988. His work is held in
private and public collections throughout the world and in 2004 he
was made the Laureate artist at the Arts Foundation of New
Zealand.