Shane Cotton
Image credit: SHANE COTTON,
Kei muri ngā mea i te rā II / Things Behind The Sun II / Dans Les Coulisses Du Soleil II, 2021, acrylic on linen, 200 x 160cm,
Private collection, NZ.
Courtesy Gow Langsford Gallery and the artist
Photo: Sam Hartnett
A whole new kind of ‘history painting’ was cooking away in the crucible of the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand at the end of the 1980s. It was a way of looking back and looking forward during a time of rapid social change, where pop culture and politics met; it was a way of trying to figure out what the country was really all about. Out of this emerged Shane Cotton ONZM (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha), one of Aotearoa’s leading Māori artists.
As a student, Cotton’s paintings had been heavily influenced by American artist Terry Winters, but together this emerging circle of artists – Cotton, Tony De Latour, Peter Robinson, Séraphine Pick, Chris Heaphy, Grant Takle and Bill Hammond as an older doyen – created their own rowdy pop-demotic figurative language to talk about class, gender and colonisation. They drew on rock music, graffiti and ’sgraffito, heavy drawing, tattoos, folk art, surrealism, Philip Guston and other artists.
Cotton first came to prominence in the early 1990s with striking sepia-toned paintings that gave the impression of being trompe-l’œil wood intarsia. Carved-up landforms, appropriated from Colin McCahon, were combined with Victorian paraphernalia, text and naïve imagery from the painted Māori meeting houses that emerged when the missionaries banned carvings they deemed pagan and sinful.
This symbolic vocabulary of ships, stars, flags, birds, furniture, Māori carving and potted plants, nested in a complex topology of landscape and scaffolding, addresses the underlying tensions and utu (reciprocity rather ... Subscribe to read this article in full
