One of the most striking works of art at The Landing is Shane Cotton’s In The Earth, which hangs in the dining room of the Cooper Residence, facing east, towards the historic Marsden Cross.
Commissioned in 2009, it obliquely references the event marked by the cross – the meeting and subsequent cross-cultural and spiritual syncretism of the original Māori inhabitants of Northland and the Christian missionaries who set up New Zealand’s first European settlement ant Hohi Bay, adjacent to The Landing.
Cotton’s work often explores themes of identity, history and spirituality, drawing on both Māori and European visual traditions. In this work, he reflects on the way that some early Māori embraced, and later adapted, the messages within the Bible to form their own spiritual lineages within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The work is one of a series of commissions by Peter Cooper, the founder of The Landing, with whom Cotton shares a close relationship and Ngāpuhi heritage. At The Landing, In the Earth sits directly within Cotton’s turangawaewae, or ancestral homeland, but several of his works can also be found at The Landing’s sister property, Britomart, Auckland.
In the lobby of The Hotel Britomart, the work Long Burning Flame, Look to Whiria references how light shining on the maunga (mountain) Te Ramaroa is said to have guided the great Polynesian explorer Kupe into the mouth of the Hokianga Harbour on the west coast of Northland.
Just a few steps away, on the exterior of the historic Excelsior Stanbeth Building, Cotton’s five-storey mural Maunga speaks to the way each person who visits or works within the area brings with them a piece of their own turangawaewae (represented by their local maunga or mountain) with them.
In the mural, each of the 25 maunga depicted sits atop or within a traditional clay pot, like the ones European settlers brought with them, decorated with Māori carving motifs – another nod to the blending of Māori and European cultural traditions. The original 25 works on paper that formed the basis of this mural are found throughout The Hotel Britomart.
Together, The Landing and Britomart showcase Cotton’s work in different contexts, providing different ways of celebrating one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important voices in contemporary art.
