| Marian Maguire |
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Born in Christchurch 1962, Marian Maguire graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1984. During 1986 she studied at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography, Albuquerque and in 1991 was Artist in Residence at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art. She received an Award for Excellence from the Canterbury Community Trust in 1998. Marian’s images mix the imagined with the real and display a personal response to history. Often figurative, her early work has also pictured architectural planning, gates, bridges and mythological landscapes. Since 1997 her prints and paintings have been largely related to Greek vase painting and in the series of etchings Southern Myths (2002) she worked a classical narrative into the New Zealand environment. In the next series of lithographs, The Odyssey of Captain Cook (2005), the Endeavour became the vehicle by which the ancient Greeks collided with resident Maori. Her recent series, The Labours of Herakles (2008), is a suite of twelve lithographs and eight etchings in which the archetypal Greek hero is cast as New Zealand pioneer. Alongside the narrative images Maguire has also produced abstract work in painting, drawing and print. In the exhibitions Forest (2003) and Flow Diagrams (2004) she has abstracted sections of patterning from the Greek vases to produce formal, optic works often with a botanical theme. More recent drawings, The Paper Garden (2007) and Botanical Studies from an Exploratory Voyage (2008), continue with patterning and move towards invented naturalism. Marian Maguire has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and her work is represented in public collections including: Te Papa Taongawera, Museum of New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki; Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu; National Gallery of Australia; The Waikato Museum, Te Whare Taonga o Waikato; University of Canterbury, Massey University, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Central Queensland University, Australia; Cambridge University, United Kingdom; The Birthplace of Captain Cook Museum, Middlesborough, United Kingdom. Essay by Dr Anna Smith from the catalogue 'The Odyssey of Captain Cook. ODE ON A SOUTH SEAS URN: THE ART OF MARIAN MAGUIRE Tiwhatiwha te po, Dark, dark is the po Ko te Pakerewha, It is the Pakerewha Ko Arikirangi tenei ra te haere nei. It is Arikirangi that is coming. What do the Ancient Greeks have in common with the South Seas? A lot, if a certain master printmaker from Christchurch has anything to do with it. Artist Marian Maguire has been working on bringing the Greeks to New Zealand for a number of years now. Inspired by the designs of classical artefacts: urns, bowls and jugs, Maguire has reworked the meeting of English colonizers and Maori through the medium of classical shapes and figures. In this new show, the collision of three cultures, not two, takes the viewer by surprise. The Odyssey of Captain Cook takes radical liberties with the history of this country, for we discover that Pakeha and Maori have now been joined by chiefs from the heavens (Arikirangi): Achilles, Athena, and boatloads of Greek soldiers. Using the voyages of Captain Cook as the pretext, Maguire explores how a nation remembers and represents its history. By implication, she also explores what a nation leaves out when it remembers; and how its vision is always skewed in favour of one race or the other. Every time we seek to understand these engravings and lithographs as the story of two nations, or two races, the artist presents a third perspective: a sleight of hand which, in a climate that favours biculturalism, makes for troubled viewing indeed. THREE HISTORIES: Before closing in on the exhibition, I would like to draw back from the images themselves to examine the ways in which Ancient Greek, Maori and a British Navy Captain with the blessing of the Royal Society might conceivably interact, and what particular values each might embody and represent for the others. I will begin with an account of Captain Cook. In June of last year, New Zealand on Air played six lectures to mark the astronomical phenomenon known as the Transit of Venus. In the final lecture, Professor Alan MacDiarmid, Director of the MacDiarmid Institute if Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, suggested that the journey undertaken to the Pacific by an Englishman to observe the transit in 1769, rivaled the ancient voyage of Odysseus in its epic courage and colour. Like Odysseus, said the Professor, the story of Captain James Cook helped us see how scientific progress can itself appear as a ‘great journey’ into unknown seas. How many millions of school children are familiar with the story of the Endeavour; of the ‘young James Cook,’ who was brave, good and clever? I remember hearing a recording of William Clauson singing a catchy folk song about Co |
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Marian Maguire work featured on this site:
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