Shane Cotton 54 Powder Garden
acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2002 and inscribed Kite Karu 705 x 1063mm
Provenance:
Private Collection, Auckland
$45 000 - $65 000
P
owder Garden marks a significant transition from Shane Cotton’s sepia-toned ‘history paintings’ that came to prominence in the early 1990s. Examining New Zealand’s biculturalism through the faux patina of age, Cotton’s paintings were often personal investigations into aspects of culture, ownership and other historical issues. The narrative potential of these earlier works is obfuscated in Powder Garden, in which a selection of embryonic symbols hover upon a seductively smoky, air-brushed background. Cotton’s once stratified landscapes reminiscent of the typographical sketches of Charles Heaphy, among others, are now confined to the very bottom of the canvas, subdued by an indeterminate dreamscape. Cotton paints intuitively, often working from rough drawings or photocopies from secondary sources. Powder Garden displays a fragmentary series of objects drawn from the artist’s rich pictorial lexicon. He incorporates signature motifs includi ng ghoulish upoko tuhituhi (tattooed heads), floating text panels in English and Te Reo, a bird (established in his earlier paintings as the ancestral bird Taiamai from his birthplace in the far North and significant in Maori folklore as messenger from the spirit world) and the concentric circle. The interrelationship between these objects is not immediately apparent. Rather, their inclusion encourages free association between symbols. This form of non-linear narrative is analogous to the fluidity of Maori oral traditions in which notions of past, present and future exist simultaneously – stories are relayed across time, rather than categorized by it. Cotton’s oeuvre embodies a constantly evolving vocabulary of signs. Conveying a series of hybrid symbols that include Maori artifacts alongside contemporary icons, Jim and Mary Barr observed that Cotton’s post-2000 paintings are more about thinking than speaking; they ‘…record the process of developing ideas rather than the presentation of ideas already well formed.’ 1 By offering multiple perspectives of mutable significance, Cotton’s paintings are not easily defined; their appeal lies in their beguiling ambiguity.
SERENA BENTLEY 1
Barr, Jim and Mary, ‘An Argument for Imagery,’ in Shane Cotton, City Gallery Wellington, 2003, p109