Vale: Joyce Mary Savinaja Gole OL

Mon 3 Nov 2025

We are deeply saddened at the passing of pioneering Papua New Guinean artist Joyce Mary Savinaja Gole (1941–2025) at age 84. Known to many for her distinctive ‘face’ pots, with their message about the importance of women’s labour, Mary began her journey thinking about women and pottery early in life. As a child, she watched her mother dig local clays and hand-build elegant spherical vessels that would store water and cooking staples.

Phoebe Arasepa beating tapa

Mary was born into the Orokaiva people of Oro Province in 1941. Like many other families in Kevanah village, Mary’s family lost loved ones when nearby Mount Lamington violently erupted in January 1951. As Mary recounted, she was at home with her parents and younger sibling when her older siblings, on their way to church, tragically fell in the direct path of the volcano’s destruction. Approximately 230 square kilometres of dense tropical rainforest around Mount Lamington was rendered a moonscape — not only stealing away precious lives, but destroying gardens and seriously impacting local communities’ ongoing food security.

Mary Gole c.1954 & 1969

Surviving this, Mary herself started school. She became a favourite of the sisters at the Anglican girls’ boarding school she attended in Dogura, Oro Province; at one point, she was asked — and seriously considered — if she would take the habit. However, a chance encounter set Mary on a very different path: she met and fell in love with the handsome, young Australian architect David Gole. In search of employment opportunities and experience for David, the young couple moved to Australia in the early 1980s. It was in the remote western New South Wales town of Brewarrina where Mary, digging in the garden one day, found her way back to clay and the feeling for making pots that would become her life’s work.

Bat pot

Mary and David, along with their young family, moved back to Port Moresby in the mid 1980s. Here, Mary joined an art group, sharing her own knowledge of hand-building with expatriate women and, in turn, learning how to work with smooth commercial clays, use gas-fired kilns and experiment with burnishing techniques. While the 1982 book The Traditional Pottery of Papua New Guinea, by Margaret Tuckson and Patricia May, became a particular source of inspiration, Mary developed her own distinctive style, working with a combination of local hand-building techniques and her own experimentation with pit-firing using salt, seaweed, sawdust and leaves to give her unfired pots a dark flashing.

Mary Gole uses coils of clay to build a large vessel, 1989

Pottery wasn’t just an exercise in technical mastery though. At the forefront of Mary’s thinking was to create her own visual language, driven by the impulse to celebrate the strength and resilience of her countrywomen. Her iconic Water storage pot – woman’s faceworksexemplify this — their unique sculptural form speaking to the incredible physical labour that village women undertake daily: working in their gardens, carrying heavy loads of root crops and produce, gathering firewood and carting water in large pottery jars, as well as caring for large families.

Water storage pot – woman’s face 2013

Such works stood out in Port Moresby’s male-dominated art scene during the 1990s. A decade earlier, women had been a part of the nation’s flourishing creative movements, sparked by a long sought-after independence from Australian trusteeship. By the late 1980s, however, the flush of financial support for artists — intended to help create a modern and unified cultural language for the nation — had begun to dry up. Mary taught pottery to expat women at Port Moresby Arts, one of the few contemporary art centres in the city and sold works at local craft markets and to foreign diplomats. In this, Mary was something of an exception amongst women practitioners in Port Moresby, making a living from her work while actively offering insights into the plight of her countrywomen.

(l-r) Margaret Tuckson & Mary Gole, 1981

Opportunities to travel — to the fifth Festival of Pacific Arts in Townsville, in 1988, and to represent her country at the 3rd International Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh, in 1986 — offered Mary with the chance to meet with other artists and share ideas. In Townsville, for example, Mary met with renowned potters Thankupi (1937–2011) and Margaret Tuckson (1921–2014).

Mary Gole with her work, 2011

I first met Mary in 2011, just as I arrived in Port Moresby on my very first visit to Papua New Guinea. After travelling to villages in East New Britain and East Sepik, the QAGOMA team returned to Port Moresby to visit Mary’s home studio and place a hold on three pots — the first of Mary’s works to enter the QAGOMA Collection. By this time, Mary was disabled by cataracts and had left off working on the larger pots, preferring to create smaller hand-formed figurines that she affectionately called her ‘susu mamas’.

Mary Gole’s ‘Susu mama’ figurines in ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial’, 2021

Beautifully ornamented with the distinctive bilas (adornments) of PNG women, these figurines continued Mary’s call for greater respect for women in her country. As Mary described it, her very first ‘susu mama’ was motivated by a story in the local Post-Courier newspaper, reporting on intolerance of women breastfeeding in public. Incensed by what she considered a foreign concept of morality, Mary created her figurines — often nursing or pregnant — to speak back.

Mary Gole’s work in ‘No 1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1966-2016’, 2016

I returned to Mary’s home studio every time I visited Port Moresby. In 2014, I was thrilled to find that Mary — after successful eye surgery — had been creating pots again and that these would be available for QAGOMA’s upcoming 2016 exhibition, ‘No. 1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1966–2016’. Mary travelled to Brisbane for the opening and was greeted by a display of 13 pots, drawn from across her oeuvre and the collections of QAGOMA and private individuals. On seeing the display, Australian journalist Sean Dorney (the ABC’s Pacific and PNG Correspondent from 1975 to 2014) admitted to having his own collection — a story heard again and again upon mentioning Mary’s work.

Mary Gole's work in ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, 2021

Such is the importance of Mary’s practice that her work was curated into ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (QAGOMA, 2021–22) and then again into the exhibition ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’ (GOMA, 2023–24), which celebrated Pacific women. Due to declining health, Mary was unable to make new works for either exhibition, but the Gallery is profoundly grateful to her husband David for making available the personal collection he had been building so that her work could be properly recognised.

Mary Gole's work in ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’, 2023

Mary Gole's Figurines in ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’, 2023

After some years of declining mobility and health, Mary was with family in her home in Port Moresby at the time of her passing. We are proud to have had her work and vision fill the spaces of these galleries and will miss her friendship, integrity and strength of spirit dearly.

Our deepest condolences to Mary’s husband David and their extended family.

Mary Gole, 2019

Ruth McDougall is Curator, Pacific Art, QAGOMA

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia