JOHN IOANE

Spending his early childhood years in Samoa, the vitality of John Ioane’s experience

Tangaroa, 2003

and feeling for his Samoan heritage resonates strongly in his work as an artist. Based in Auckland, John’s multidiscipline practice involves sculpture, painting, installation and performance and often acknowledges the spiritual and transitional nature of space (the va) as a place of transformation-birth and becoming. John has commented “Sacred spaces are not necessarily a church, but it’s a place where one likes to be in, a place of affirmation.”

Johns celebrated installation Fale Sa (sacred house) consists of 500 carved cowry shells and three wooden totems that appear to come to life within a watery audio-light scape. Inspired by natural forms and the poetics of everyday life, Fale Sa (and similarly Maleosi) connotes being rooted to ones culture and genealogical heritage as a source of strength, adaptation and beauty. It is in this same spirit that John creates his performance works and collaborations. Preferring to call them ‘rituals’ or ‘christenings’, he states, ‘I’m not acting, there’s no rehearsal, what happens largely depends on the nature of the event, the space itself and what’s going on at the time’.

Penina: The Fourth Window, 1995

Resisting the label ‘artist’ John insists, ‘life is too big and deep to consider what I do as being about art or describe myself in a singular way’. Instead, he regards his four children as both the greatest joy and creative contribution he has made to the world. As they grow, making their own contribution, John has been able to devote more time to his work. Creating new collaborations and the potential for public art projects, theatre set designs, scriptwriting and film.

John was the Macmillan Brown Pacific Artist in Residence for 2008 and received a Creative New Zealand Pacific Innovation and Excellence Award in 2005. He has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and abroad, recent group exhibitions include, Pasifika Styles (2006 - 2008), University of Cambridge Museum, UK, Le Folauga (2007), Auckland Museum, Samoa Contemporary (2008), (Pataka, Porirua, Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui) and Paradise Now? (2004) at the Asia Society Museum, New York.