shane cotton moerewa - liquid sleep

Author: Anthony Byrt
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 8 October 2026
304 pages

For over thirty years Shane Cotton (Ngapuhi, Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has developed a rigorous and evolving painting practice, using the medium to layer the visual languages through which Aotearoa can be seen and understood. In this book leading art writer Anthony Byrt takes us on a voyage into Te Tai Tokerau to unravel the relationships, landscapes and histories that are the wellspring of Cotton's art - the world of Kororareka and Hongi Hika, of mission stations, revolutionary religious ideas and Te Tiriti. By travelling deep into Cotton's visual universe, Byrt helps us make sense of the paintings and the world-changing collisions that occurred in the nineteenth-century North - collisions that still shape Aotearoa today. Working through the remarkable range of Shane Cotton's work, this is a vital, expansive and necessary account of one of the country's most important living artists.

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 Ngati 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).