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 eighth lithograph in the series shows Herakles at 'home' in New Zealand writing a letter 'home' to England. He inhabits a classical urn in a scene taken from a scene of a settler's hut in the Auckland War Memorial Museum: Preparing dinner on the gum field taken by William Beattie in about 1898. Visible through the window is the barren landscape that Herakles attempted to cultivate in plate VIII. Here the land before Mount Taranaki [Egmont] has been cleared, in an image taken from a photograph in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Herakles's lion skin is hung over the back of his chair and his dog sleeps before the roaring fire. The mantelpiece holds items associated with his classical roots: a postcard of a Greek temple (to which he is, perhaps, replying in his letter), and a vase and a statuette of the famous Venus de Milo. The vase, however, bears a prominent British flag and a scene of the Death of Captain Cook. A version of this vase forms the final print of Maguire's previous series 'The Odyssey of Captain Cook' (ZBA7690).

Herakles's book shelf bears classic titles for a European gentleman's library alongside works about the Pacific, and practical settler manuals, with Maori carvings acting as bookends. The Iliad and Odyssey, Bible and Paradise Lost share the shelf with 'The Voyages of Captain Cook', Darwin's 'Origin of Species', works on sheep farming, carpentry and Mrs Beeton. Here is also John Boardman's modern book on black-vase figures. Two books are particularly notable. Anne Salmond's 'The Trial of the Cannibal Dog' (2003) is a modern history which re-examined the friendly and fraught encounters of Cook's crews with the people of the Pacific. All of Herakles' works are in English - the dominant colonial language - but Maguire adds a fictitious Maori-Greek dictionary to further complicate the cultural politics of the scene.