08/08/2026
Shane Cotton, Maunga (2020) — Excelsior House, Tāmaki Makaurau
For years I’ve passed these 25 painted pots rising five storeys up the wall of a former warehouse in Waitemeta. Shane Cotton (Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) developed the work from 25 paintings on paper, translated to architectural scale for Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, survey at the Auckland Art Gallery.
The pot has been one of Cotton’s signature motifs since 1993. It descends from the potted plants painted inside Rongopai, a wharenui built near Gisborne in the late 1880s for the prophet Te Kooti, where his followers used European realist technique to render Māori subjects — one of the earliest cross-pollinations of Māori and Pākehā visual culture.
The vessels remind me of the pots from antiquity, where the pot was also not merely just a container but also a surface for story, the primary medium through which cultures without books held their myths in circulation.
Consider the terracotta column-krater attributed to Lydos (ca. 550 BCE); a monumental wine-and-water bowl nearly 59 centimetres across, its rim guarded at the handles by two gorgoneia. Its subject is the return of Hephaistos to Mount Olympos: the divine smith, cast out of the mountain of the gods by his own mother, plied with wine by Dionysos and escorted home to the peak. Exile and return; the mountain as the place one belongs to and is drawn back toward. Cotton’s pots, each named for a maunga and gathered here in the heart of the city, carry the same current in a Māori context — people arriving in Tāmaki Makaurau while holding fast to the mountains of their birth.
As Cotton puts it: “The way that the pot is a container, the boat is also a container… they can carry things: ideas, beliefs and deliver narratives.”
They often remind me of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn — “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man.”
He could be talking about our maunga.
Maunga, Shane Cotton, 2020.
Terracotta column-krater attributed to Lydos, ca. 550 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.
