John Pule (b. 1962)

Born in Niue in 1962 and emigrating to New Zealand at the age of two, esteemed poet and novelist John Pule first gained international recognition as an artist during the early nineties with his large unstretched canvases which, inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Niuean bark-cloth painting (hiapo), intertwine his own deeply personal experiences with contentious contemporary issues of colonialism and Christianity in the Pacific. Invariably employing a grid-like format which divided the canvas into rectangular cells, the aptly named 'hiapo paintings' featured a bewildering variety of imagery from abstract geometrical patterns to comic strip-like religious narratives and a plethora of hybrid creatures, hu...