B.
The Sydney connection
Behind the scenes
No prizes for spotting connections between Shane Cotton's paintings and New Zealand history.
But with his paintings newly hung in Sydney, at Campbelltown Arts Centre, it's interesting to note some less well-known Australian connections in the works.
The works Datta and Damyata, for instance...
...are the result of time Cotton spent in residence at Sydney's Artspace in 2008. Removed from his home territory, Cotton began to study the sandstone cliffs around Woolloomooloo. Back in the studio, he started coaxing the forms of birds and skulls from the contours of this landscape. Laid out on pristine white canvases and rendered in near-phosphorescent blue paint, these fragments look like mysterious rocks or mineral samples in a geological laboratory.
There's another Sydney connection to be noted in the mighty title painting The Hanging Sky...
The face within it is a self-portrait carving now in the Auckland Museum, which was made at the bidding of Samuel Marsden by Cotton's Ngapuhi ancestor, the warrior chief Hongi Hika, on a visit to Sydney in 1814.
Nearby in Campbelltown hangs the equally vast and haunting Tradition History & Incidents, with its formation of Toi moko (Maori tattooed heads) drawn from a colonial photograph.
Such heads are currently being repatriated to New Zealand from musuems around the world. As it happens Sydney's Macleay Museum is one of the museums to have recently returned ancestral remains to New Zealand.
Of course, what matters as much as where these forms and faces come from is how Cotton transforms each one – where he takes it. 'I want to see what it looks like in paint', he says. 'I want to see if it becomes something other than what it was.'
Related
Collection
Shane Cotton Untitled (Head 6)
From a distance, these ten works by Shane Cotton have a strongly graphic quality. They look like a row of archery targets, or a series of pulsing GPS locator beacons zeroing in on a significant location. But when you get up close, the surfaces of Cotton’s circular forms appear softly weathered, as if the pressure of the world around them has worn them away slightly. You become aware of the small painted motifs within the concentric circles—heads, texts, bars, dots, smaller targets, ancient presences. And suddenly, rather than looking like something that belongs to space, like the trajectory of an arrow or the flight plan of a plane, you see that the works might equally be concerned with time, that the bands of colour might be read as the rings of a tree or as a model of eternal return.
The works themselves took several years to make. In 2009, Cotton spent a couple of weeks in Israel working with the Gottesman Etching Center to produce the circular forms. (The colours are drawn from the Israeli and Palestinian national flags, as well as the tino rangatiratanga flag and Cotton’s impressions of the landscape.) They’re monoprints, which means they exist as single images pulled from the printing press—essentially, they’re printed paintings. When Cotton got back to New Zealand, he put the sheets away for three years, finally adding the smaller motifs over the etched surface by hand.
The heads in the images are toi moko, or mokomokai, preserved and tattooed Māori heads. Cotton has worked for many years now from a copy of a photograph of Horatio Gordon Robley, a colonial soldier and artist who fought in the New Zealand wars, with his collection of heads displayed on a wall behind him. It’s a horrific image, a deeply shocking one. “I wanted to see whether I could take a heavily laden image from our history and say something different with it. […] I think they’re really about what it means to have and hold on to a memory or retain a likeness, which is also what painting was historically about. So I thought I’d start painting them and see what happened.”
(Your Hotel Brain 13 May 2017 - 8 July 2018)
Collection
Shane Cotton Takarangi
Before there was the world of light there was Te Pō, the night; and before Te Pō there was Te Korekore, the void, the realm of potential. There’s an unearthly quality to this painting, where the dark sky behind the cliff might signify the vastness of space rather than the fall of night. “All my work, in some form, has a relationship to Māori cosmology”, says Shane Cotton. “A lot of what I paint is about the relationship of matter and ideas to one another, and where things sit in context to one another: whakapapa.” A giant rock face takes on human features. Birds plummet past at great speed, forming themselves out of or into carving patterns: are they flying or falling? Among them is a bird which might be Taiamai, the great white ancestral bird of Ngāpuhi, who vanished by melting into a rock that still stands not far from Ohaeawai in the Far North. Cotton’s painting describes a place of potential and possibility, a world which intersects with our own yet is not of it.
(Te Wheke, 2020)