Forms of Recognition: Shane Cotton at The Dowse

Throughout Shane Cotton’s decades-long career, the painter has continually used symbols of migration and containment, as well as motifs specific to Māori people, who are indigenous to his country, New Zealand—or rather, Aotearoa. His solo exhibition “Te Puāwai,” meaning “the blossoming,” has opened at The Dowse, an art gallery located a short drive from Upper Hutt, where he grew up.
Many of the nearly forty works on view are paintings of toi moko, tr