Lying in the Black Land is one of the first paintings completed after Shane Cotton was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1998. It is amongst the most important works in New Zealand’s art history due to its exploration of the historical conflict between Christianity and Maoritanga. The conflation of Christian and Maori imagery in Lying in the Black Land is central to Cotton’s work from the late 1990s. The paintings that Cotton produced between 1998 and 2002 have been loosely grouped together as the Kenehi or Genesis paintings and are characterised by a marked interest in his own personal and family history. Of these exceptionally significant works, Lying in the Black Land is one of the first and most significant as it references and repeats the fraught relationship that played out between 19th-century colonial missionaries and Cotton’s Ngapuhi ancestors, whose traditional art practices were suppressed as they were thought to be pagan. It is therefore poignantly appropriate that Cotton should explore this historic relationship in pictorial format. Its scale too, is significant, in that it marks a radical change in the artist’s oeuvre as his work shifted into what Lara Strongman has termed Cotton’s ‘museum scale’ pieces.¹ Indeed, the monumental scale of Lying in the Black Land transforms the painting into a veritable environment that engulfs the spectator.
Cotton neatly splits the vast canvas through palette choice with the left half bearing a burnt brown ground while the right half is coloured in an inky black which came to dominate his work of the late 1990s. A solid white cross further subdivides the left half of the work, the centre of which is dominated by a large floating head composed in a style that references Maori carvings. In Maori meeting houses, a carved body-less head is often seen at the apex of the gable and is known as the parata or koruru; it is representative of the ancestor after whom the house is named. The body of this carved head is often seen on the ridge pole inside the porch while the house itself is also symbolic of the koruru body. In Cotton’s painting, traditional Maori and Christian symbols are seamlessly juxtaposed with the large tiki head bearing a saintly halo while its tongue offers a carved pattern of puriri leaves. This amalgamation of Maori and Western motifs is central to Cotton’s art practice of the period and it recurs throughout the large expanse of Lying in the Black Land. Two smaller koruru appear at the base of the cross as the fruits born by a small plant while passages in te reo Maori abound alongside koru patterns and Western emblems of eternity.²
Several more koruru are dotted across the black portion on the right-hand side of the canvas. This half of the painting is inundated with complex yet covert symbols. Small and predominantly white crosses march horizontally across the pitch-black darkness. A couple of them are ominously twisted, hinting at the potent symbol of white supremacy in the swastika of the Nazi party. The centre of the painting is taken up by a white bird settled on a fluttering ribbon which is embellished with te reo Maori that speaks of the puriri trees of Taiamai. The motif recurs in Cotton’s later work where the bird and the puriri tree are invoked as symbols of the area of Taiamai.³ It can alternatively be seen as a reworking of the potent ancient symbol of rebirth, as a white phoenix rising from the ashes.
Alongside time-honoured Western motifs, Cotton also includes more localised imagery with shrunken silhouettes of mountain ranges anchoring the work in New Zealand while the appearance of a steamship and a charabanc car have been identified by Strongman as allusions to ‘waka transformations’ found on meeting houses along the East Coast from the early 20th century.4 Two waka are found in the work, forming one of a number of Cotton’s poignant motifs that hold Maori and Pakehaārelevance simultaneously. A brown waka sits upright at the bottom of the painting while further up the canvas a white waka lies upturned. The waka are inscribed with text and refer concurrently to the biblical story of Christ’s incredible ability to walk on water and to the Ngapuhi proverb that queries “Who will right the upturned waka?” Both narratives hold personal relevance for Cotton deriving from his familial marae at Ngawha.
The jet-black half of the canvas hosts a multitude of complex symbolic imagery. Thick white ribbons of paint swim out in a serpentine manner from a square tiki head at the top of the work, which Cotton employs as a backdrop for poignantly symbolic Maori words which are written in bold, demanding capital letters. The large sprawling letters that spell whakanuia suggest acknowledgement and recognition, celebration, promotion, commemoration and merriment. As with most of Cotton’s paintings, possibility and ambiguity reign supreme. Much of the strength and success of Cotton’s work lies in his use of imagery and words that abound with latent symbolism. Whakanuia could allude to the racial inequality that many still see as dividing Maori and Pakehaāor perhaps to the need for Maori concerns to be better acknowledged. There is even the possibility that the painting is itself celebrating New Zealand’s unique biculturalism. It is significant that the word has been taken up in recent years to designate the celebrations held on Waitangi Day in Rotorua that are intended to educate people about traditional Maori culture. As well as powerfully suggestive words, Lying in the Black Land contains Maori proverbs or whakatauaki, which succinctly allude to the values, feelings and beliefs of Cotton’s ancestors. JEMMA FIELD
¹Lara Strongman, ‘Ruarangi: The Meeting Place between Sea and Sky. A Consideration of Shane Cotton’s Work 1993–2003’, pp. 14–31 in Shane Cotton: Survey 1993–2003, Exhib. Cat., Wellington, 2004, p. 23. ibid, ² p. 24. ³ibid, p. 24–5. 4 ibid, p. 24.