Nicholas Thomas

"John Pule is one of the most significant artists living and working in New Zealand today. 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 barkcloths of nineteenth-century Niue, Pule has been fascinated by the Polynesian past and present, but his work ranges far more widely, responding both to ancestral culture, and to the global...

"The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across thousands of miles of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?...

The dazzling colours and patterns of the art of the Pacific Islands have long entranced Western audiences, not least artists such as Gauguin and Picasso. The tendency has been to regard Oceanic art as 'primitive', mysterious and shrouded in taboo, but Nicholas Thomas, in looking at and beyond the familiar, stunning surfaces of masks and shields, carved canoe prows and feathered gods, discovers the significance of such objects, past and present, for...