Hi, I'm Marian Maguire, I'm an artist from New Zealand
and I have made three sets of work which I am best known for
in print making which combine New Zealand history with
Ancient Greek vase painting.
I was down in New Zealand in a place called Mackenzie country,
which is this mountain basin- its actually a high
plateau that looks like the desert and a car was driving
along this dusty road so this dust was coming out the back
I thought I can imagine the Greeks coming kindof trudge
trudge trudge with the dust rising off and I decided to look at
setting some of these violent scenes in New Zealand
There are actually a lot of mythical similarities between Maori
culture and Ancient Greek culture there is a whole lot of very
easy parallels that run.
The fantastic thing about lithography is that you can get tonal
range out of one layer of printmaking all in one go which is
unusual for printmaking.
But what is also fantastic for me in terms of lithography and why
I chose it for these series is because it was the commercial
process in the nineteenth century so it was used to reproduce
the images that related to the colonies- so there is a real
match between the method and the way images were seen
So it ends up having the appearance of that makes sense for
the era, and I am talking about the nineteenth century in New
Zealand; the colonial history
The wars that erupted through the 1860s more or less 1870s
saw battles either side the actual fighting was how
colonisation came about finally by force
I decided with Titokowaru's dilemma that the protagonist
would have to be Maori so I am looking at it from the other side
I fished around I suppose for various Maori leaders and
decided on Titokowaru who is from South Taranaki.
Within Maori culture he is of high rank and he was incredibly
spiritual it just so happened that he was also a gifted military
strategist
I wanted to keep running the Greek/New Zealand history
combination but I couldn't do it with a single Greek character
because the ideas are too complicated so I brought in
Socrates to slow down things and put them in the realm of
discussion rather than violence even though its about war. At
various times in Titokowaru's life he was in all the different
positions of really trying to forge a peace, resisting through
passive resistance to actual fighting and the whole
thing is quite fluctuating.
And I was thinking about that- what must have been going
through his head at all these times because he was an
intelligent man and he thought hard so thats really why I put
him in conversation with Socrates because I think they would
have, they were issues that Socrates was thinking about
So in this image here the question they are discussing is
about passive resistance so there is a person standing with
naked with their hands open there's someone else coming at them,
daring them effectively daring them to attack them when they are
naked with their hands open
In Maori terms the ones who have died, they are buried but
they are still but you still talk to the Tupuna the ancestors and
they are part of the whole lineage they are still carried
forward
He [Titokowaru] said this thing and it was in Maori and I can't
say it in Maori
"I shall not die, I shall not die, when death itself is dead
I shall be alive"