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 fifth lithograph returns to black and white, using the most straightforward frieze of black-vase figures in the series. Herakles is shown hunting deer in the forest, referencing his third labour to capture the Keryneian hind. He now holds a rifle rather than his traditional club, with a bandolier of cartridges slung over his lion skin. The forest is filled with animal species introduced to New Zealand by the British, each labelled for identification: boar, goat, deer, rabbit, rat, possum and Herakles himself. Only the native species require no label, neither the shy kiwi at the base of the central tree, nor the tree spirit perched at top right, whose wings are decorated with Greek eye symbols meant to bring good fortune.