the first incision I saw I dreamed no more: John Pule

To Survive You Must Swim: John Pule at Gow Langsford Gallery

By David Eggleton

 In his new exhibition titled the first incision I saw I dreamed no more, John Pule offers, through a handful of works, a quicksilvery essentialism. Here, it's as if the status of a plant is the status of the planet, and a holistic sense of the world might be best depicted as a mysterious string-game with links to ancient Polynesian methods of navigation through space and time. 'A man that is born falls into a dream like a man that falls into the sea,' wrote Joseph Conrad in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, set in the Pacific. Joseph Conrad goes on to say that the way to survive is, 'with the exertions of your hands and feet', to push yourself up from the depths. John Pule's artworks, offering parables, allegories, fables, are those of a survivor, expressing a profound connection to Oceania, which, as the visionary and radical pacific intellectual, Epeli Hau’ofa, a Tongan anthropologist has written, constitutes one 'sea of islands'.

                John Pule's art-making sprang originally from a willingness to question everything and from a love of the paradoxes of life that art-making uncovers. While he grew up within a vibrant Niuean sub-culture in Auckland (or Okalana in Niuean/Vagahau Niue), the youngest member of a migrant family from Niue, he has looked far beyond that dramatic displacement and rupture. He understood early that 'to survive you must swim'.  Beginning as a child of the Polynesian diaspora, and as a product of a south Auckland proletarian upbringing at a time still bound by old colonial rules, he has emerged a story-teller whose personal accounts of racism, reformatory school, labouring jobs, and autodidacticism have become mythic.

                Out of a kind of vortex of psychic scars and an oppositional stance, a refusal to be intimidated or cowed by New Zealand's legacy of modernist monumentalism, John Pule has produced Pasifika artworks both large and small of great oratorical and optical power – at once bold, tactile and emotive – repurposing symbols, legends, rituals, tropes and texts from many sources, and in the process tirelessly crisscrossing the Moana Nui, figuratively as well as literally. His painterly and graphic creations of the imagination speak to and for the greater community. Working in on-going series and compositional suites, he conjures forth imagery that expands our sense of possibilities and affirms renewal and regeneration.

So, to write about this exhibition is to write about just one small corner of John Pule's vast oeuvre. In the exhibition's nine paintings he combines the concept of the ideal garden with an assertion of whakapapa (lineage), expressed as a kind of painterly reverie that verges on the ecstatic. In the accompanying eight drawings, it's as if he has unpicked and rewoven complex patchworks of netting to express ambivalent and essentially melancholy meanings, as Mavetevete (2025) and Niu Tilani, Tokanoa, Okalana (2025) exemplify. 'Mavetevete' means to unpick or else scatter and disperse, while the phrase 'Niu Tilani, Tokanoa, Okalana' translates as 'New Zealand, Freedom to Wander, Auckland'.

                 The artist has described in one of his earlier poems how, after his birth, his 'pito', his umbilical cord, was ceremoniously buried by his father on the fonua of his ancestors, on family land in the village of Liku, establishing for the artist a magical and prophetic connection to the spirit of place. John Pule has since built a studio at Kavaka, Liku, and it is here that these paintings and graphic works were made. Shamanic objects as much as artworks, they turn Liku and environs into a spiritual realm – one they dextrously celebrate and make buoyant. The notion of a place of perfection or spiritual homeland has many names – arcadia, utopia, nirvana, Celestial Kingdom, paradise, seventh heaven, Eden, Hawaiki, Avaiki, Fonuagalo – all implying a glorious abode of the eternal, or else a place that has been lost and needs to be restored. Manifestations of this realm are implied in these depictions in this exhibition.          

                For the artist's family there was a tradition of subsistence farming on plots of land around the village of Liku, and when the family moved to suburban Auckland in the 1960s, John's father sought to maintain this plantation tradition with a succession of bourgeoning vegetable gardens. The paintings, in a sense, memorialise his father's gardens and the ancestral gardens of transmigration, and in this way John Pule is his father's son for the return home, to use Albert Wendt's great phrase, in coming back to live on Motu te Fua ('island all alone'), or Niue. But if the plant forms celebrate fecundity and island bounty, and the graphic works are cryptograms trawling for ethnographic evidence of place-finding, tool-making and food-gathering, they are also rigorous works of contemporary art. They share territory and conversation with a host of artistic forebears, from Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse to Paul Klee and Jackson Pollock to Pat Hanly and Emily Karaka.

                However, Pule pays homage to the traditional hiapo (tapa) patterns of his Niuean forebears as much as to the traditions of modern art. Fusing influences and repurposing them, he handles paint as if he is inventing a new language, one that speaks of beatific rapture; while his graphomania sees him separating out strands of black lines with a pen-nib to weave his own net-like structures. Two mixed-media works, Ae Lani, Motu Kehe (2025) and Overseas (2025) have titles that indicate the subject matter is about traversing the Pacific: 'lani' is Hawaiian for heavens or sky, but it also stands for 'island', while 'motu kehe' means foreign land in Niuean. They depict a personal iconography of gods and demons, animals and plants, houses and temples, thorns and spikes.

                Both works are visual riddles or cyphers: accretions of glyph-like imagery that seem to pulse with vitalism. Like mental notes scribbled down, caught on the fly, they suggest a kind of inner frenzy, an urgent need to capture things seen in visions before vanishing. Beneath yolky swipes and vinous smears, and under flecks and blots of watercolour or ink that evoke seawater or tears, or gummy sap, curious creatures are depicted: slug, beetle, centipede, ant, earthworm, dragonfly – and perhaps planets or comet tails. There might too be references to switches of hair, trailing ribbons, and pieces of pandanus matting, all being embryonically sketched beneath dribbles of paint and ink. In sum, the surfaces of both these works emerge as bleached, scratched, irradiated, vascular, as if the contents of museum vitrines have been emptied out to weather the elements on a remote Pacific atoll.

                The artist's fingers consciously sift through dirt in search of origins. In his symbolic uprooting and replanting, it's as if refined young earthworms might rise beneath the touch of his green thumb, and heraldic insects materialise out of drops of blood. Stains squeezed or rubbed as signs on artworks carry memories, while the artist's studio is located near the family graveyard where ghosts might walk. Flower garlands, shell inlays, geometric designs, fishbone arrangements: the enduring motifs of the island of Niue are summoned up from the vast reservoir of the vā moana and times past, to jostle and joust as omens and auguries against present realities and looming crises.

                Having mastered the art of weaving inked lines together, John Pule is like a fisherman throwing out a net, or a drummer tapping intricate rhythms. In his drawings, spidery webby lattices are scrawled or stitched to evoke coverings, bringing to mind not only sections of cloth for church ceremonies but also the bark fibre pounded for hiapo, and pandanus leaves looped and tied into baskets. And one also thinks of the thread-like mark-making of modernist artists such as Mark Tobey, Brice Marden and Allen Maddox. X marks the spot, as in grids and maps.

                The nine paintings included in the first incision I saw I dreamed no more at first, in their abstract sweep, suggest the experiences of a diver embracing the oceanic expanse around Niue – someone snorkelling a reef or rockpool and returning entranced with what they have seen: kelp forests swaying and undersea creatures slithering. But to stare more closely at these swirls and ripples of brilliant colour is to re-surface from the encroaching ocean, the rising tide, and read the paintings not as wavering seascapes but as light-filled landscapes, heightened and made mystical, and– as in the paintings of the nineteenth century British Romantic, Samuel Palmer – filled with ripeness to the core.

To use a Niuean philosophical concept, these sea-slash-land-scapes imply the state of 'malilolilo', which means to be transformed or spun around, destabilised. It's a state of mind that the painting Standing on the Shores of Aotearoa Looking Towards Nukututaha (2025) tends to confirm, with its discombobulating title effectively transferring the viewpoint to New Zealand's shores, and thus enacting a kind of psychic mirroring or reflecting. Where are we exactly? Is Aotearoa too a Pasifika state of mind?

                The paintings are transformative in their poetic intensity, maintained by the deft juxtaposition of various intense hues, which, like lava flows, have pooled and puckered into glossy skeins and skins – the oil-based enamels slathered on in virtuoso fashion, or worked around with brush and pen and rag. Here, in these dense, mirage-like gardens, the shining plants have taken on the powers of sorcery or enchantment. They are part of a fantastic botanical order, not necessarily benign, that over-arches the anonymous, small-scale human figures depicted. And we too as spectators bearing witness are enfolded, or perhaps embraced, by the forking tree limbs, the fleshy leaves, the many-seeded climbing vines.

                Niue is a coral atoll covered in fertile soil and rises steeply out of the ocean with a jagged coral limestone coastline. The coral breaks off into sharp pieces which lie hidden in the soil, while the rainforests are lush and crowding. John Pule's paintings take this setting and amplify it, affirming transcendental implications. In Are We Able To Live Here (2024) sacramental groves and tapu caves pre-dating Christianity are the forcing ground of strange plant forms: they are stylised totemic figures that might be guardian spirits looking for a good time. The plant forms have a molten, glowing quality to them. The sunlight glares down and the rainforest glistens. Out of this moist and spawning earth, all is luxuriant and blooming. The other paintings too are imbued with hot-magma, fever-dream colours, as if they might suddenly burst into flame and burn away illusion, maya. Brightness has force; the world takes on a lustrous quality; and the gardens sprout less tendrils than the tentacles of hybrid entities. Pods and gourds bulge and myriad eyes peer though leaves. In cocoons, strange beings are undergoing metamorphosis.

                The painting Let Us Live Here (2025), shows everything as having a sheeny, watery, soused quality, reminding us that water connects Aotearoa and Niue – not just ocean but rain. It's as if a heavy downpour has passed over: the foliage seems fathoms deep; the land is the verge of turning to pulp and mulch; human forms blur and dissolve into mud; and meanwhile an ecstatic dolphin form stands upright in the background. The swell of rain has combined land, sea and sky into a unity, and a marine deity has manifested as an ancestor figure.

By contrast, Let Us Stay Here One More Night (2025), presents a nocturne in warm shades of blue. The whole scene casts a spell; there's a sensual, sultry atmosphere to the dark, humid evening; and the plant life in the closeness and stillness seems expectant and quivering, subtly responsive.

                Reds, blues, greens, yellows and browns. In painting after painting, each colour sounds an emotional note or chord, while each plant is always particular and distinct. In Uhiuhi (2025), the towering plants parade in stately dance. 'Uhiuhi' is the Niuean term for luxuriant or abundant, affirming festivities and a place that is bountiful. Here then is a ceremonial encounter between tupua or gods. It's a moment of celebration, connection, sharing – an affirmation of the continuity of Niuean customs and ceremonies. And yet there's also a comic element to these cartoonish effigies. They resemble grotesque Triffid-like creatures, or something escaped from the musical Little Shop of Horrors, even as they assert the mana of the sacred garden. John Pule's paintings are always complex, as human emotions are complex. Above a network of interlaced roots, the human dimension is scaled down to the size of a seed. These paintings might be saying, this is how it is to be tiny, to be almost nothing, pitted against Niuean cosmology, against vā toka: the relational space between us and ancestors.

- David Eggleton, July 2026