Whakapiri atu te whenua

Whakapiri Atu te Whenua
In this painting Shane Cotton draws on imagery from late nineteenth-century Māori figurative painting found in the meeting houses on the East coast - a style inaugurated by the prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and especially prominent at Rongopai marae at Patutahi near Gisborne. Māori figurative painting was one of the first cross-pollinations between Māori and European visual cultures. In Whakapiri Atu te Whenua, Cotton reinterprets and reshapes that early visual interaction.

Potted history
The pot plant is a reoccurring symbol in Cotton's paintings. For Cotton the pot has associations with the containment of land, land nurture, and ownership. The title of the work means 'retain the land' and is attributed to Te Kooti. It refers to the land wars of the 1860s and 1870s and to Te Kooti's campaigns to halt the appropriation of Māori land. In Whakapiri Atu te Whenua, the dying plants in the base of the central pot are an allegory of the adverse effects of the containment of land and people. Cotton has created symbolic shorthand: the pole, pā palisades, flags and flagpoles, and the decapitated plant speak of land ownership, colonisation, and Māori resistance.

Blasphemy of missionaries
Cotton's home marae is at Ngāwhā. Like many of the meeting houses in the Far North, the one at Ngāwhā is without Māori customary carving. This was a result of early Christian missionaries and the devastating impact in stopping the practise of carving, which they viewed as a blasphemous worship of false idols.

Te Papa collection
Drawing on Māori, Pākehā, and international influences, Shane Cotton has made a major impact on the mainstream New Zealand art.