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.

Maguire's seventh image in the series continues the darker questionning of Herakles's status as heroic settler. Here his muscled black-vase figure labours to dig the land, while a classical vase acts as an ancient 'thought bubble' showing the arcadian landscape that he dreams of producing. The vase is both classical Greek in form and reminiscent of the porcelain vases so prized in Europe in the period. The landscape is also a European ideal based on a painting by Salvator Rosa. However, Rosa's figures have been replaced by this black-vase style dancing Bacchante. Herakles dreams in European visuals and stereotypes, yet labours with his back to this vision, while his spade seems to make little impact on the barren landscape that he inhabits in reality. Again this is taken from a photograph in the collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum: Burnt native forest by Arthur Ninnis Breckon.