Anthony Byrt is the 2023 Kaipukahu Writer-In-Residence at the University of Waikato, where he is currently working on a novel and a monograph on artist Shane Cotton. At this year’s Ramp Festival they will be speaking in depth on this collaboration and much more!

Shane Cotton (Ngāti Rangi, Ngati Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) is one of New Zealand’s leading and most celebrated contemporary artists. He was born in Upper Hutt, New Zealand in 1964, and has a BFA from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was a lecturer in the Maori Visual Arts Programme at Massey University until 2005.

Shane Cotton is key to a generation of young Māori artists who came to prominence in the 1990s for their innovative use of non-traditional materials and processes, while directly addressing concerns of importance to Maori. This generation, including his contemporaries, Michael Parekowhai and Peter Robinson and others, brought a new vision to contemporary art in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and in particular Māori visual art.

Cotton has also received numerous awards, notably the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship (1998), made a Laureate of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand (2008), and received an ONZM for services to the Visual arts in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Cotton lives and works in Kororareka, New Zealand.

Anthony Byrt is an award-winning New Zealand author, critic and journalist. His first book, This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art (AUP) was shortlisted for the general non-fiction prize at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. His second, The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London, 1962 (AUP) was longlisted for the same award in 2021.