This Must Be the Island — Liga Hanai e Motu

About the Author

Gregory O’Brien is a poet, essayist, visual artist and curator. Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, he worked at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009, during which time he curated exhibitions (with accompanying books) by Ralph Hotere, John Drawbridge, Colin McCahon, Rosalie Gascoigne, Noel McKenna, Elizabeth Thomson, Fiona Hall, Laurence Aberhart and others. As a printmaker, he has worked with Michael Kempson’s Cicada Press since 2008. He co-curated the touring John Pule retrospective Hauaga and subsequently included Pule’s work in projects including Oceania: Imagining the Pacific (City Gallery Wellington/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) and Kermadec: Nine Artists in the South Pacific, a touring exhibition based around the art project he coordinated with Bronwen Golder in 2011. Poems from that project were included in Beauties of the Octagonal Pool (Auckland University Press, 2012) and Whale Years (AUP, 2015). Recent books include House and Contents (poems, AUP, 2022), Don Binney: Flight Path (AUP, 2023) and a book-length meditation on the Pacific region, Always Song in the Water, which was reissued in 2023 to coincide with an exhibition of the same title which he curated with Jaqui Knowles for the New Zealand Maritime Museum. That exhibition will travel to Japan in 2027, as well as being shown at further New Zealand venues.

John Puhiatau Pule is a self-taught, highly original artist who draws on Pasifika traditions, expressionism and a visual language attuned to his writing. Since 1994, Gow Langsford Gallery, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, has been his principal dealer. His works have been exhibited in major institutions world-wide and there are significant holdings in all the major New Zealand art galleries, and also in the Australian National Gallery, the Queensland Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Scotland. As well as producing numerous collections and pamphlets of poetry, he published two novels — the shark that ate the sun (Penguin, 1992) and Burn my Head in Heaven (Penguin, 1998) — and, with Nicholas Thomas, the ground-breaking volume Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth (Otago University Press, 2005); Thomas also edited Hauaga: The Art of John Pule (OUP, 2010), which accompanied the major touring exhibition Hauaga (Arrivals): John Pule (2010–12). Having travelled extensively in the Pacific, including to Raoul Island as a participant in the Kermadec art project, John moved from Auckland back to Niue in 2015, re-establishing himself on family land at Liku. He continues to travel and exhibit widely.