This extraordinary painting evolved from the Meretoto project with The Diversion Gallery, in which we have taken artists out to Meretoto/Ship Cove, the place of the most sustained contact between Māori and Captain Cook, in the Marlborough Sounds near Cook Strait. A chiefly figure appears to ponder – what just happened here? – as the ‘ghost ship’, the Endeavour, heads back out to sea. The legacy of that contact – weapons, implements, stories of other cultures, disease, disruption – impacted Māori long after the departure.
