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.

In the fifth lithograph in the series Maguire shows the Greek goddess Athena in black-vase style to left. She watches as Captain Wallis arrives at Tahiti and is attacked by Maori canoes. This view of Wallis's arrival is taken from an engraving by E Rooker for Hawkesworth's account of the voyage, while the Maori canoes are a stylised version of an engraving after Sydney Parkinson's drawing from Cook's first voyage. The right edge of the print is bordered by a stylised image of a New Zealand fern, worked into a style often used on Greek vases.