Creativity on a grand scale celebrates Pule's work

Hauaga: The Art of John Pule
Edited by Nicholas Thomas,
Otago University Press, $125
Hauaga (Arrivals) celebrates the show at Wellington's City Gallery of Niuean artist, poet and novelist John Pule. If the book had legs it would make a coffee table in itself but it is much more than those words imply.
Pule came to South Auckland as a toddler, growing up in a typical Pacifika working-family lifestyle. His creativity began with writing poetry under romantic influence but his individualistic, self-developing passion brought him in touch with the young, fervent poets of the Auckland spoken poetry scene of the 80s.
Later, he discovered art and the book includes a vivid early self-portrait after the style of Van Gogh.
Nicholas Thomas has put together a reflection of the many facets and influences which make Pule a fascinating character and creative artist. Greg O'Brien contributes a portrait of the artist as many people. Thomas interviews Pule in serious mode over a broad range of his work and life while Peter Brunt surveys the Pule phenomenon in his essay titled History and Imagination in the Art of John Pule. A selection of Pule's writing reveals the man as passionate, loving and grieving. Many of the love poems written to his wife, or in sorrow over the death of their first child, are decorated like medieval manuscripts.
The volume, however, is in the main a survey of Pule's achievement with its major parallels in the 19th-century version of tapa cloth, the hiapo, as progenitor. The grid-like abstract patterns encompass vignettes of island life, Christian symbolism, land and seascape, sailing vessels, rain and clouds. Pule enters far more complex patterning. His humans make love, encounter horrendous beasts in settings sometimes based on the track patterns of village life. They climb ladders, meet ambulances and aircraft, live in ominous political times. Pule was well aware of protest movements.
The huge paintings, mostly on unstretched canvas, must make an overwhelming impression which a book, even as large as this one, cannot convey in reality.
The dramatic abstract shapes and stripes of the artist's later development combine with tiny, unsettling episodes within them. The sense of loss, the death of continuity with Pacific Island inheritance combined with the struggle to make a new Oceanic reality comes through vividly in this major volume.
Hauaga is to be treasured for its serious coverage and elegant production of an artist, print-maker and writer whose work will surely astonish even more in the future.