New Zealand-born artist, Marian Maguire, creates lithographic series that combine the colonial history of New Zealand with imagery from Greek vase painting. She brings together the rich print and photographic iconography of Europe’s encounter with New Zealand with the classical imagery of Ancient Greece to comment on the timeless and yet culturally nuanced nature of empire and conflict.

The addition of black vase iconography serves to emphasise the loaded history that Europeans brought with them to the Pacific to meet an equally ancient Maori culture. The weaving of mythic classical heroes like Odysseus and Heracles into narratives of European exploration highlights the changing nature of received histories. Just as classical myths changed through oral traditions, perceptions of the Pacific changed in Europe as different accounts and images were brought back.

In her series The Labours of Herakles, Maguire sets the classical tale of Herakles (Hercules) in New Zealand, combining his labours with colonial encounters and struggles between Maori and the British. Introduced and concluded by decorated classical urns, the twelve prints show Herakles as both coloniser and colonised, struggling to make sense of his life and labours. In every print Maguire quotes directly from prints and photographs produced as a result of British exploration and settlement in the Pacific. Many of these are in the NMM collections.

This first lithograph introduces the series. A group of classical urns shows scenes of New Zealand and black-vase images of Herakles at work, many of which anticipate later plates in the set. At front left, Herakles uses a theodolite to survey the land, in a pose taken from a photograph of a team surveying the Whanganui river in 1905, in the collections of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Next, he carries a Maori carving towards a Doric temple. At centre he is shown with a dairy cow, in a composition taken from a vase by the Lysippides Painter in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in which he drives a bull to slaughter. At far right he plants a pine tree, in a pose taken from Exekias's vase painting of the suicide of Ajax. Two urns at the back show variations on watercolour images of New Zealand by Charles Heaphy from the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. To the left is a scene of logging in the Kauri forest in the Kaipara in 1839, to the right his view of Mount Egmont with the foreground land cleared of vegetation. As a whole, Herakles is introduced as labouring to colonise New Zealand alongside the British, clearing land, farming animals and removing indigenous culture. The urns sit on columns in different classical styles with the print's title inscribed on the central one.