Two Māori boys in an English field

Ayesha Green is best known for employing reproduction as a process to interrogate historic images which claim power and authority and to reference historical controversies related to the colonisation of Aotearoa. ‘Two Māori boys in an English field’ offers a more intimate side of Green’s practice, but no less complex.

The painting reproduces a photograph taken by her mother of her two younger brothers in Yarnton on the outskirts of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Green’s father had relocated the family from Hamilton to attend the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for nine months. Twelve years old at the time, Green has since come to understand that the photograph was linked to her then-growing romanticism of the English landscape, which she says as fuelled by reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. The artist began to understand this ‘gaze’ as being connected to the romanticisation of the landscape in early New Zealand art history.

Green notes, ‘I think … it's about thinking through how we can take the narrative that has been placed onto New Zealand landscapes and flip it back around – my brothers become the romantic dreamers of the English frontier.’

– Nathan Pōhio, Senior Curator, Māori Art, 2022

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