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 lithograph concludes the series with a magnificent turquoise amphora decorated with colonial scenes. At centre Herakles battles with a Maori 'taniwha' (dangerous water being) with scales and a tail that threatens to engulf him. He seems to fail in his final attempt, reminiscent of his eleventh labour, wrestling with Triton and Nereus to fetch the golden apples. Other friezes in the decoration echo scenes in Maguire's series 'The Odyssey of Captain Cook'. At top, a European ship (perhaps captained by Cook) meets a Maori war canoe taken from a drawing by Sydney Parkinson made on Cook's first voyage. Below, a group of sperm whales are harpooned by hunters in a scene taken from Joel Samuel Polack's 1838 engraving of 'The North Cape, New Zealand, and sperm whale fishery'. Beneath the struggling Herakles and taniwha, a group of settlers carry boxes and bundles from their ship, and Herakles in the guise of a shepherd watches a paddle steamer cross a lake by a small colonial settlement. At the very bottom, soldiers march off to war above a stylised image of an octopus.

The mighy taniwha dwarfs these images of colonial endeavour into insignificance, just as it threatens to destroy Herakles. He seems unable, ultimately, to overcome or acquire the powerful relationship of the indigenous Maori to their land and seas.