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 lithograph, eighth in the series, comments on the collections made on Cook's voyages. To the left a classical Greek urn is decorated with the face of the Maori warrior Natai after a drawing by de Sainson from Lapérouse's voyage to the Pacific in the 1820s. He has already appeared in plate II meeting and questioning a Greek black-vase figure. Here he has been 'collected' to be taken back to Europe.

To the right is a botanical image of flax, from an engraving after Sydney Parkinson's drawing on the first voyage. Parkinson drew hundreds of botanical specimens for the naturalist on the voyage Joseph Banks. Banks's career back in Europe was made by his research and collecting on this voyage. He had Parkinson's drawings engraved for a grand 'Florilegium' publication, but they were only eventually produced by the Natural History Museum in the 1980s. The NMM has a full set of the engravings (ZBA5924-ZBA6667).