John Pule 'Niniko Lalolagi/Dazzling World'

In 2014 John Pule said: ‘Most ideas come from living things. The best ideas come from where I come from. Where I was born is a spectacular event in itself, and that is dazzling for me as an idea.’ He meant Niue Island, where he was born in 1962; the family moved to Auckland, New Zealand two years later and that was where he grew up. His re-discovery of his homeland, sparked by his first visit back in 1991, has been the engine of his art-making ever since. First through his exploration, in painterly terms, of the indigenous tradition of tapa cloth making, called hiapo; and then through his consideration of Niuean cosmology and the society it both underpins and sustains. This painting, Niniko Lalolagi / Dazzling World, is from 2004 and one of the more resplendent of the series known informally as the cloud paintings.

Like others in the series, Niniko Lalolagi uses a restrained, indeed minimal palette: in this case, red and black acrylics and inks inscribed over the white field of the canvas. That white field is vast, seemingly illimitable, like the sea or the sky. Before it, or perhaps within in, long strings of vines fall from the heavens above or rise up from the earth or the sea below. These are the tendrils of a cordyline tree, one of five varieties native to Niue, called ti mata-alea, and said to be the ancestor or perhaps progenitor of humankind. However mata-alea may also mean ‘voice’ or ‘speaking’, and even, as a noun, ‘medium of communication with a spirit’, reminding us that John Pule was a writer before he became a painter and, in both words and images, has continued to channel the voices of the gods or of other supernatural beings through his work.

The cloud islands rising and falling — for these paintings are undeniably kinetic — along the tendrils of the ti mata-alea are home, as it were, to a range of idiosyncratic motifs which Pule uses over again and again. These are delicately inscribed and, at times, almost vestigial, as if just coming into being or, equally, just fading from view. In Rob Garrett’s words, they include ‘hybrid bird-like lizards, botanical motifs, birds, the Christian cross, Pacific church buildings, aeroplanes, broken aeroplanes mounted by two-headed monsters, ambulances, decapitated heads, fantastical creatures breathing fire, skulls, sex acts, island silhouettes, drifting island-clouds, and his own poetry.’ As even a cursory look at Niniko Lalolagi will demonstrate, this is not a complete list.

There are twenty-eight (perhaps twenty-nine) cloud islands in the painting, suggesting a certain duration for the work: a month, maybe. As they rise and fall before our eyes, somewhat like plaster horses on a merry-go-round rise and fall, they suggest the ceaseless coming into form and passing away of vegetable creation; and, concomitantly, of animal creation, including ourselves, which is dependent upon it. Some commentators, for instance an unknown writer (possibly Greg O’Brien), have intuited an existential darkness at the heart of these paintings — ‘The clouds, which could be celestial or nuclear, hover over landscapes of human and mythological activity. Much of the imagery revolves around war and destruction and the blight of religion.’ — but in this work at least the impulses behind it, as the title suggests, are entirely celebratory. This is a work which is at once a joyful celebration of creation and an example, in itself, of the joy of creation.

David Eggleton, in a prescient essay, ‘John Pule and the Psychic Territory of Polynesia’, published in Art New Zealand in 2001 (before the inception of the cloud paintings), wrote: ‘Such supercharged graffiti promise to lead us forward into the lush paradise-garden at the heart of Creation, that realm where the artist seeks to take us through his spidery lattices which twine and knot like spectacular creeping vines and amongst which images dwell like clusters of exotic fruit.’ I think this accurately and sympathetically identifies the territory of Pule’s expeditions in the cloud paintings — territory he continues to explore now that he spends more and more time at his home on Niue.