Art of the Pacific: A Selection of Etchings by John Pule

John Pule was born in 1962 on the island of Niue and moved to New Zealand in 1964. From the mid-1990s, his powerful, enigmatic, and personal paintings attracted great interest, and his work came to be widely shown. Famously inspired by hiapo, the innovative barcloths of nineteenth-century Niue, Pule has communicated through his work a fascination with Polynesia’s past and present, but his work ranges far more widely, responding to tribal culture as well as environmental and social issues of our time. Pule express himself through painting, drawing, and also poetry.