Shane Cotton explores Māori history and artistic appropriation in New book

Author Anthony Byrt published a book about artist Shane Cotton that explores the complex history of cultural appropriation and Māori heritage in New Zealand.

The narrative follows Cotton as he navigates the tensions between Pākehā artists using indigenous motifs and the demands of Māori artists and critics for cultural protection. Byrt describes Cotton as a history painter who addresses how Aotearoa New Zealand can move forward as a postcolonial nation.

The book details Cotton's artistic evolution, specifically his "black period" in the 2000s. During this time, Cotton produced dozens of canvases featuring mokomokai, which are tattooed and preserved Māori heads traded with Europeans in the 19th century. These paintings confront the grim reality of colonial trade and the spiritual weight of these remains.

Byrt notes that while many of these heads were sold to global museums, the government-funded Karanga Aotearoa programme has returned more than 300 to their ancestral iwi since 2003. In recent years, Cotton's work shifted toward vibrant colors and landscape paintings in Te Tai Tokerau. He now creates "Tiki paintings" to repopulate ancestral figures and floral works that symbolize a culture in bloom. He also produces landscape paintings that sample the work of colonial artist Augustus Earle.

Byrt argues that Cotton uses these figures as avatars to explore the hybridity of New Zealand's identity, where contradictory systems coexist in a balanced state.