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 Odyssey of Captain Cook, Maguire combines the story of British explorer Captain James Cook with Homer’s mythic tale of Odysseus. Bookended by classical urns that show Cook’s arrival and death, a series of ten prints show Cook’s encounters in New Zealand. Each is either observed or participated in by Greek black-vase figures. Maguire quotes directly from images produced on and after Cook’s voyages, many of which are in the NMM collections.

This black and white lithograph, fourth in the series, represents Cook approaching the shore from the left. His boat and the ship in the background are taking from an engraving after William Hodges's drawing of the 'Landing at Tanna' on Cook's second voyage. His companions in the boat have been replaced with a large classical urn bearing a scene of fighting Greek warriors. Cook is met by a Maori warrior on the shore, who is taken from an engraving after a drawing by Sydney Parkinson on Cook's first voyage. This warrior has already appeared meeting Cook in the frieze of the classical urn in Plate I. Here on the beach he stands in front of a rocky arch taken from an engraving after a drawing by HD Sporing published in Hawkesworth's account of Cook's first voyage, which showed a 'fortified town or village called a hippah' at Tolaga in New Zealand. He also appears facing Queen Victoria over the Treaty of Waitangi in Maguire's series 'The Labours of Herakles' (ZBA7692).