Niuean artist weaves pictures made to be read

By MICHELE HEWITSON

You could say that this is John Pule's moment. He's just had a sellout show at the Gow Langsford Gallery and his first exhibition at a public gallery, People Get Ready, is hanging at the New Gallery.

You might assume Pule would be keen to surf the wave of success. But Pule giggles (he giggles a lot) and says: "I'm not too sure how to explain it. It's all just worked for me."

He has decided to spend much of this year writing his third novel, a pursuit which - as any New Zealand author will tell you - is unlikely to reap the financial rewards of a sellout exhibition at a high-profile dealer gallery.

And Pule, this year's University of Auckland Literary Fellow, is not, as he will readily admit, the most accessible of writers. His last novel, Burn My Head in Heaven published in 1988, raised the ire of at least one critic. Writing in the Herald, Jenny Jones was incensed by Pule's refusal to provide a glossary to help non-Niuean speakers to interpret his text. Pule's response was not designed to placate: there was a perfectly good Niuean dictionary available. People should go out and buy it.

Siting in the sun-drenched dining room of the Grey Lynn villa he shares with his partner, jewellery designer Sofia Tekela-Smith, and their 5-year-old son, Nava, the softly spoken Pule is unrepentant.

"Why do we have to make it easier by having to put a dictionary in? Why don't books written in English have dictionaries in them? English speakers use words sometimes that are really hard and you have to go and look them up.

"To make an effort to understand is all part of reading and understanding someone's writing."

His paintings are made to be read. He is an artist who says he is first a poet. He first encountered an intriguing thing called poetry when, in 1980, he came across a Hone Tuwhare poem in the Listener.

"It was strangely arranged and I found out it was called a poem," Pule says. "I just looked at it and I was trying to figure out: how can you understand? What kind of messages do you get by looking at this very minimal use of words? And when I found out it was called a poem I started writing."

You can see why the artist who started out as a performance poet and became a painter and novelist hangs on to the distinction. The poem represented a whole new world for Pule. At the age of 14 his reading skills were poor. His dad had died when he was "10 or 11" and "once he died everything just kind of went out of control."

He was a Borstal kid who went on to be expelled from school at 14 (he won't say which school. "They might read it and go: 'He's ours,"' and invite him to speech days).

"I think," he says in his understated way, "that my life then was pretty complicated."

He went milking cows, which he hated, then, still aged 14, saw an advertisement for an accountant at the Westfield freezing works - and turned up to apply with his term reports clutched in his hand.

"I don't know why," he laughs now. "I thought the idea of getting a job was to look in the newspaper and if you see something you just go for it." It seems to be the Pule modus operandi: see an ad, apply for the job; see a poem, write one.

He didn't get that job, but he did get another one - shaking a bottle filled with bottletops so the sheep would get "really, really frightened and run up the ramp."

He was rescued, if that is the right word, from a life of manual labour by the discovery that he could write poems. "I just decided that I didn't want to work in factories any more. I wanted to do something more creative, which I think was pretty incredible for an 18-year-old with my background - living in Otara, considered the most backward, sickly area in New Zealand at the time."

Through the live poetry scene he met artist Tony Fomison - and painting. If this journey from Borstal to a sellout exhibition sounds like an overnight rags to relative riches story, it took a little longer than that for Pule to get to here. He spent 11 years on the dole; during that time he "learned my craft ... I learned a lot of things."

But he hasn't forgotten his first canvas: a billboard he saw at a building site in Kingsland which he persuaded a taxi driver to help him load into the car late at night. There was no roof rack on the taxi so the driver held it from his side, Pule from the other. They managed to get the 3m board back to Pule's flat in Karangahape Rd - but not before it fell off in the middle of Great North Rd.

Pule is as prolific a storyteller as he is an artist. He talks about his first opening - in two rooms owned by the Catholic Church, which gave him free rent in exchange for gardening. He had no electricity so the opening was during the afternoon. "I chose Cyclone Bola day and it rained all day."

He talks about his partner, Sofia - whose jewellery he wears around his neck - and their son, Nava, whose art work is as much in evidence in the Pule residence as is that of the artist. He talks about the house he grew up in, a state house in Otara, which he's recently been back to with a video camera and poems to read aloud in the rooms where he ran up and down as a small, not terribly happy, child. He plans to edit the video and use it as a piece of performance art.

You could ask him about his art, about he uses how text and symbols to create a painterly language with which to explore his preoccupations with migration, history and family. About how his art works as a series of maps from which to navigate identity.

But if Pule had to describe his art, he says: "I'd tell people a story. Not a story about art - but a story. Pacific Island artists have stories to tell."