Shane Cotton

About the Author

Anthony Byrt is an award-winning New Zealand author, critic and journalist. He has written art criticism for publications including Artforum, NZ Listener and Metro, and has published two major books. This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art (AUP, 2016), a finalist in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, was described as ‘breathtaking’ and a book that ‘enlightens and provokes’ (NZ Listener). The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London, 1962 (AUP, 2020), longlisted for the Ockhams, was ‘a wonderfully written, affecting account of the personalities and layered complexities of life in and around the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s’ according to Professor Thomas Crow from NYU; Professor Matt Saunders from Harvard wrote that Byrt has ‘a special talent for zooming into a milieu’. Byrt’s whakapapa ties him to Ngāti Kahu ki Whaingaroa and the Dalmation gumdiggers who settled later in Te Tai Tokerau. He currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne with his family and has recently published his first novel, Dying Days (Affirm Press).

Shane Cotton ONZM was born in Upper Hutt with Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha iwi affiliations. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts in 1988 and a Graduate Diploma in Teaching from the Christchurch College of Education in 1991. In 1993, he joined Robert Jahnke in lecturing on Massey University’s Toioho ki Āpiti Bachelor of Māori Visual Arts programme. In 2005, he left the university to paint full time.

His painting practice examines the visual consequences of the nineteenth-century collision between Māori and Pākehā cultural and spiritual systems. Drawing particularly on Māori art’s intersections with Christianity, as well as his own whakapapa and the histories of Te Tai Tokerau, his work prompts vital conversations about nationhood and biculturalism.

In 1998, Cotton was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago and received the Seppelt Contemporary Art Award from the MCA in Sydney; he became an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2008 and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the visual arts, in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours.