Shane Cotton, son of Te Tai Tokerau, has pioneered a new, hybrid form of history painting, unique to Aotearoa and specific to the Far North. And what a history it is. Hongi Hika, Thomas Kendall, Te Kooti, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the colonial trade in tattooed heads (mokomokai). The newly published book Shane Cotton: Moerewa|Liquid Sleep by Anhtony Byrt charts the artist’s four-decade journey from the magic realism of his 1990s sepia works to the trauma-recounting mokomokai canvases of the mid 2000s to his current lush evocations of a northern Erewhon.
Since the early 1990s, Cotton’s epic tales have been injected with moemoeā (visions) from his Ngāpuhi dreamtime—apparitions from a cultural theta state. Fact, fantasy, Christian & Atua observances rise and fall like the brackish water on an estuary tide. The resulting collisions and mutations constitute a cultural alchemy unique to these shores. What one poet has called New Zealand creole.
The power of these near transcendental meditations is that no matter how “weirdly comical … hyperactive and dark” as one international critic has described Cotton’s paintings, they are fact-based, grounded in the whenua of the North—signposts or tohu from Te Tai Tokerau’s astonishing history. The mātāpuna or source for these shamanic creations can even be located on a map.
Moerewa lies between Waitangi and the Bay of Islands and Kaikohe just north of Kawakawa on State Highway 1. Keep going and you’ll arrive at the battle sites of Ōhaeawai and Ōkaihau. The cemeteries of the local churches are the final resting place of casualties from the Northern War of 1845. The Anglican Church Missionary Station of Waimate North, where the second signing of Te Tiriti took place on February 9, 1840 is a little further up the road.
In 2024 my wider whānau celebrated 200 years in Aotearoa. Our story here begins with the Rev. Richard Davis, my great, great, great, great grandfather, a lay preacher at Waimate North. He was present at the signing of Te Tiriti at Waitangi, then accompanied Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson to Waimate. Family legend has it that the Treaty was signed on our ancestor’s front lawn. Six Ngāpuhi Rangatira signed Te Tiriti that day, amongst these were leaders representing Cotton’s own hapū of Ngāti Rangi and Te Uri Taniwha.
Centuries before 1840 the ancestress Moerewa emerged from her “liquid sleep” onto this very whenua. She is an avatar for the power of dreams. Today Moerewa is known as Tuna Town due the abundance of eels in the local streams. Cotton’s Ngāpuhi whakapapa is centred in this territory between Moerewa, Ngāwhā and Kaikohe,which Byrt describes as “the heart of the octopus, the place from where the iwi extends in all directions … Cotton grew up at the other end of Te-Ika-a-Māui, in Upper Hutt, but often headed north to stay with his grandparents in Moerewa.”
Moerewa|Liquid Sleep is the book that cross-cultural tragics (including myself) have been waiting for. It’s a celebration of Aotearoa as a state of mind, in the form of a mahi-tahi (partnership) roadtrip between the artist and the author, an exploration into the truth and fiction of the Far North.
So, who should hitch a ride? Pretty much anyone who likes a good yarn or has stood before a Cotton painting, agog, attempting to decipher what look like crossword clues in Te Reo. Those of us who have wondered why hīkoi always seem to start up north should read Liquid Sleep immediately. Its pages contain a roadmap into the northern deep state. Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu have been keeping the score for some time. Literally, they know where the bodies are buried. At the conclusion, Byrt makes this argument, “The extraordinary beauty of Aotearoa’s culture is that nothing is simple. The country we find ourselves in now is the warped and twisted outcome of a long, productive and at times devastating collision that began in Te Tai Tokerau.”
The journey begins with Anthony Byrt tracing his own roots, on the banks of the Herekino River. This is Te Rarawa country, south of Kaitāia and north of the Hokianga. Pretty remote. It’s a bold move from Byrt to open proceedings with his own family history. “My great-grandmother lived just down the hill. I often spent time there during the school holidays.” An uncle ran the local bus service. He describes himself as a “mongrel son of the north” with Dalmatian gumdigger roots on the one side and Hongi Hika adjacent whakapapa via a suspected convict ancestor who married Hongi’s cousin Ururoa’s daughter Turikatuku II.
For the writer and the artist, it’s all close to home. Together, Byrt and Cotton visit battle sites, churches and urupā in the north. Those occasions where the author makes mention that his own son is along for the ride are particularly vivid. Father and son unravelling errors of embedded memory and joining “the genes are in me and you” dots of their family history will ring true for many readers. They did for me.
So Byrt’s got some ancestral skin in the game. But this also means he is well-placed to peer into the fog of war, religion, colonial and tribal histories and fix on that “extraordinary beauty” and where required, separate fiction from truth. As a writer he combines a forensic approach to research. He has a love for facts, and a disdain for the shibboleths and spin that can smother the language of the artworld like didymo. Moerewa|Liquid Sleep is Byrt’s third significant enquiry into the art of Aotearoa. His first This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art (AUP, 2016) interrogated “a genuine popular intrigue with contemporary art and the nagging fear that it is a con-job”. His second The mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London, 1962 (AUP, 2020) caught lightning in a bottle in the form of New Zealand artist Billy Apple’s foray into the pop art scene during the swinging 60s. He is also a regular contributor to international contemporary art journals such as Art Forum.
Dying Days (Affirm Press, 2026), his first novel has just been published. Set in Trieste in the final days of WWII, it follows the fascinating tale of the Mexican stand-off between the 28th Māori Battalion and General Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. Byrt was fascinated by the thought that both lines of his own whakapapa could have been on opposite sides of that conflict.
Much art writing is bedeviled by a coded syntax. There is a joyless word gruel that gets between me and artwork these days like a nightclub bouncer. Those tiresome liminal spaces of current art writing where a taxonomy of something or other is interrogated, in relation to materiality as narrative, are sadly, mostly a con-job.
With Moerewa|Liquid Sleep, for Byrt as much as Cotton, it’s personal. But like a metaphoric pungawerewere, the spider’s web, it all holds together, tethered by whānau and iwi relationships and the epic truth is stranger than fiction arc of Te Tai Tokerau history. Byrt writes, “The North is a painful story. But it is a beautiful one that embodies the truth of how we’ve ended up where we are. And it is Cotton’s story to tell.”
Their roadtrip is an odyssey of six passages, from and to the north. The chapter headings make this explicit: (1) The Covenant/Te Kawenata, (2) Mission Station/Te Whare Mīhana and (3) The First Book/Te Pukapuka Tuatahi. The balance of the chapters evoke the gospel structure of none other than Te Paipera Tapu, aka the Bible in Te Reo Māori. The first Māori translations of scriptures such as Kenehi (Genesis), Exodus and the Lord’s Prayer were published in 1827. Northern Māori were fascinated by God and his words. As predicted by their tohunga, the future was at last arriving in Aotearoa. The Pākehā Atua came bearing the gift of written language.
Chapter one takes us back to the 1990s, when Cotton burst onto the New Zealand art scene armed with a set of cultural references, that were, to cadge a bit of contemporary artspeak, validated by “embodied experience”. In his case, it was the entire colonial history of Aotearoa and specifically the artistic wayfinding afforded by the painted interior of a meeting house created in 1887 to celebrate the anticipated (yet unfulfilled) homecoming to Waituhi, near Gisborne, of a titanic figure of New Zealand history, Te Kooti. In their haste to prepare for the arrival of the Ringatū (upraised hand) leader, mana whenua, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki did not have time to create a whare whakairo (carved house). Necessity being the mother of invention, iwi artists turned to a relatively new medium on these shores: paint. The result was an exuberantly decorated interior whose only comparative cultural precedent might be an Italian fresco cycle such as Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel from the 1500s. The painted scenes of Rongopai (Good News) are bursting with naturalistic images of horses and iwi leaders in European dress, scenes from ‘te ao hou’ the new world Māori were confronting in the later 19th century. There are also bulging decorated pot plants sprouting vines and imported flowers in full bloom. Rongopai can be read as a cinematic storyboard of ‘te ao hou’. It is one of the most singular artistic creations in all of Aotearoa and one that Cotton fell for, hard. For a century, the painted house had waited patiently for the recently graduated painter to arrive. Rongopai “provided the spark for Cotton’s transformation into one of Aotearoa’s most important contemporary artists”.
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki employed the Christian tool of prophecy to translate his flaming visions into a deliverance narrative, promising iwi Māori freedom, just like the Old Testament Israelites of the Exodus, on their own embattled or seized lands. The Christian faith, which rewards the pious believer with salvation, became the vehicle for tangata whenua to reclaim their God-given mana.
In the second half of the 19th century, from the Far North to Taranaki, Waikato, the East Coast and deep into the Urewera ranges, dispossessed iwi were rallying around inspirational warrior leaders like Te Papahurihia (Te Atua Wera) in the North and Te Kooti on the East Coast. Their prophecies conflated Christian parables of redemption with atua-led belief systems, reframing this faith-based hybrid as iwi-centric and then careering off in new directions. “Christianity became fuel, accelerating Māori creativity and spirituality,” as Byrt describes the activating principal that Cotton spotted inside Rongopai.
This is the ‘creole’ motor that powers the game-changing sepia works of the early 1990s. They debuted at Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington in 1993. It was a moment as exhilaratingly disruptive as William Webb Ellis picking up the ball and inventing the game of Rugby. Cotton, fresh from his discoveries at Rongopai, and now armed with a conceptual kete filled with hitherto unknown (to the wider culture) symbolic Māori motifs, invented his own visual language, and set about rewriting the rules of the art game in Aotearoa. Byrt quotes curator Robert Leonard on the impact of works such as Whakapiri Atu te Whenua (Hold Fast to the Land) from 1993: “Cotton’s engagement in matters Māori suddenly felt explicit, urgent, and deep.”
The tones of works from this period mimicked the evocative sepia hue of early albumen photographs that captured the New Zealand frontier in the 1870s. This deployment was a masterstroke, enabling Cotton to present his tableau with the authority of historic verity. But as Leonard noted, such works were closer to surrealism than history painting. Byrt, too, challenges a traditional reading of that term: “Cotton has often been called a history painter, but that doesn’t do justice to the representational question at the heart of his practice: if time does not exist as a line, then where does history exactly exist?”
A canvas such as Te Ao Hou (1993) dives into this chronological puzzle with glee. The title translates to ‘The New World’. But which one? The world of whalers, missionaries, horses and guns the Pākehā brought in the early 19th century, or the proto-fantasy of matauranga Māori in post-war Aotearoa as seen on the pages of the magazine Te Ao Hou, published by the Māori Affairs Department between 1957 and 1982?
Cotton’s pre-2000 works take place in this hazy space, nominally ‘i ngā wā o mua’—the times before. In this steampunk ‘new’ world a maunga-scale cowboy boot is being given a glow-up with flags and garlands, perhaps in preparation for a great feast or haakari of the sort that was a feature of Ngāpuhi ritual in the mid 19th century. The Te Papa collection contains a watercolour dated 1849 by Captain Richard Oliver entitled Feast at the Bay of islands which depicts an enormous gantry or scaffold, and flying pennants, remarkably similar to the structure surrounding Cotton’s boot and spur in Te Ao Hou. Coincidence? Cotton’s new world was too personal to be history painting, but too grounded in the local, the North and whakapapa to be surrealism. But things were clearly being lost and found in translation.
His 1990s works remain so potent today because they landed with uncanny timing into one of the zeitgeist defining debates of the period, one that still flares like a peat fire in the wider culture. In a word: appropriation.
Part 2 of Hamish Coney’s epic review is published in ReadingRoom tomorrow. Shane Cotton: Moerewa| Liquid Sleep by Anthony Byrt(Auckland University Press, $89.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
