VEE | Collections Online - Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

item details

NameVEE

ProductionShane Cotton; artist; 2006; Palmerston North

Classificationpaintings

Materialscanvas, acrylic paint

Materials Summaryacrylic on canvas

DimensionsImage: 1500mm (width), 1800mm (height), 35mm (depth)

Registration Number2006-0019-1

Credit linePurchased 2006 with Ellen Eames Collection funds

Overview

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Shane Cotton has been working with representations of toi moko since the early 2000s. His use of the form is contentious: it is intensely charged imagery, given that toi moko are Māori human remains. They are the heads of tūpuna (Māori ancestors) that have been ritually preserved as part of customary burial practices. Within Māori culture, the head is viewed as the most sacrosanct part of the body and toi moko are both exalted and deemed tapu (sacred).

Central and looming large, the toi moko image in VEE — a giant face contorted in rigor mortis — emphasises the art of tā moko, the blue/black Māori facial tattoo carved into the skin. The title is a reference to the patterning and cuts of the tā moko design. The painting is also emblematic of the commodification of Māori human remains and the violence and upheaval created by their trafficking as highly sought-after collectables. (Their repatriation from museums and collections around the world has evolved rapidly in recent years.)

The single floating head of VEE emphasises the dislocation of toi moko from their physical bodies, their hapū, their iwi (subtribes and tribes) and their lands. The toi moko image in this painting is also used by Cotton as an undefined symbol for which we need to find meaning.

VEE reworks a toi moko sampled from New Zealand colonial war artist Horatio Gordon Robley’s book Moko: the art and history of Maori tattooing, 1896. Cotton floats the toi moko in a skyscape and the rocks and birds surrounding it relate to a tribal narrative of the artist’s own that acts as a metaphor for transformation. The toi moko that became a museum artefact in Robley’s hand is returned to an allegorical tribal landscape by Cotton and is restored, through its repositioning, to ancestral status. Its return to the iwi landscape to which Cotton belongs alludes to his own tribe’s involvement in this divisive nineteenth-century trade and reflects the complexity of history.

Megan Tamati-Quennell