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.

In the sixth lithograph in the series Herakles looks darkly from the right over his attempt to clear the New Zealand forest. He takes the form, again, of the Maori chief Natai drawn on the comte de Lapérouse's voyage to the Pacific in the 1820s, but wears Herakles's distinctive lion skin, and has lost his 'moko' facial tattoos. Echoing his aged and drawn face, his lion skin is shabby with some of the teeth broken. Likewise, compared to plate III where he discusses boundary issues, here Herakles has retreated backwards a little, out of the picture plane. Behind him, billowing smoke fills the sky as the forest is burned to clear the land. Maguire here uses a photograph from the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The fire has evicted the 'atua' spirit of the forest which emerges to the left, raising questions around the ethics of Herakles's labours and his status as a 'heroic' settler.