Whakapiri Atu te Whenua by Shane Cotton

Fine Art Print (NZ)

Image size in millimetres: 280 x 310

Update: This print has now sold out. Print of Cotton’s highly regarded painting completed in 1993. Published by the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. The title of the print and copyright information is printed below the image (on the white framing margin which we don’t include in the print’s dimensions given above - we always quote the image, not paper size of a print). Te Papa’s collection notes offer a well written summary of the meaning behind the artwork, we quote from this with appreciation “In this painting Shane Cotton draws on imagery from late nineteenth-century Mäori 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 Pātūtahi near Gisborne. Mäori figurative painting was one of the first cross-pollinations between Mäori 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 Mäori 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, pä palisades, flags and flagpoles, and the decapitated plant speak of land ownership, colonisation, and Mäori resistance.”

Like NZ painters like Shane Cotton? You will find more prints for sale of paintings like Whakapiri Atu te Whenua by Shane Cotton in these collections at New Zealand's specialist fine art print store:

Shane Cotton Prints
New Prints (NZ)
Still Life
Maori Art & Artists