{"product_id":"surreptitious-limited-print","title":"Surreptitious — Limited Print","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEdition of 25 · The original is gone\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eThe Sneak\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSurreptitious\u003c\/em\u003e — the word itself moves like its subject. Quiet. Sideways. Already inside before you noticed the door was open.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis painting captures a single mythic moment: Māui mid-shape-shift, slipping through darkness toward Hine-nui-te-pō, the great goddess of death, in his final and fatal act of defiance. He was trying to crawl through her — to swallow death itself — and emerge immortal on the other side. He almost made it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe painting doesn't show the ending. It shows the in-between. The transformation. The sneaking.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eWhy Māui\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eI came to this story personally.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor a long time I was a graphic designer — good at it, employed, capable. But art was always the thing underneath. The thing I kept doing on the side, kept putting off, kept almost committing to. I wasn't an artist yet. I was something adjacent to it, circling it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen I found the story of Māui trying to crawl through Hine-nui-te-pō to become immortal, something clicked. Not the godhood part — I'm not trying to live forever. But that moment on the threshold, where he's already committed to the shape-shift, already mid-transformation, not yet through — that's the moment I recognised. That's where I was.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMāui didn't shape-shift into something foreign. He shape-shifted into a form that was already his.\u003c\/strong\u003e That's what this transition felt like. Not becoming someone else — becoming more completely myself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis painting was made at that edge. It's not about becoming a god. It's about becoming the thing that makes the time you have here worth something.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eA new face for tiki\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the centre is a reimagined tiki — not the familiar, standardised form you've seen a hundred times. Something stranger. More alive. Deliberately wrong in all the right ways.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf Māui was a shape-shifter — \u003cem\u003ehe atua, he tangata, he manu, he ngārara\u003c\/em\u003e — then his tiki form shouldn't be fixed either. It should look like something caught mid-change. Something that hasn't settled yet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat instability is the painting. The lines don't resolve cleanly. The forms bend into each other. The face in the upper right is already grinning — aware, watching — while the central form is still becoming.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eHe atua. He tangata. He manu. He ngārara.\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese four phrases appear directly in the work, scattered across the canvas like labels on a being that refuses a single category:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eHe atua\u003c\/strong\u003e — a god\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eHe tangata\u003c\/strong\u003e — a person\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eHe manu\u003c\/strong\u003e — a bird\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eHe ngārara\u003c\/strong\u003e — a reptile, a creature, an insect\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese are the recorded forms of Māui across different traditions. Not metaphors — actual accounts of what he was and what he could become. The painting treats them as simultaneous truths, all present at once. You're not looking at Māui as a man. You're looking at all of him at the same time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd I recognise that. Not because I've shape-shifted between worlds or fished up islands. But because I've had to become different things to survive, to learn, to keep moving. Accountant. Graphic designer. Videographer. Painter. Employee. Sole trader. Each one a real version of me — not a mask, not a performance — but a form I had to fully inhabit to get to the next one.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMāui wasn't pretending to be a bird. He \u003cem\u003ewas\u003c\/em\u003e a bird. And then he was something else.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe question isn't which one is the real you. They all were. They all are. The shape-shifting isn't a loss of self — it's the full expression of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eThe jawbone\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eInside the mouth of the central form — look closely — the jawbone is there.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is \u003cem\u003eTe Kauae o Murirangawhenua\u003c\/em\u003e, the jawbone of his ancestor, gifted to Māui so he could fish up Te Ika a Māui. A sacred object held in the mouth, the place of language, of breath, of incantation. It's not decorative. It's the source of his power in this moment, the tool he carries into the dark.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eThe puhoro, stitched\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the body you'll find puhoro — associated with speed, agility, the legs of warriors. Here it's rendered loose, almost stitched-looking, like it's being applied in real time, or like it was already there beneath the skin and is now showing through.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePuhoro on a shape-shifter is a paradox — why mark a body that won't stay the same? But Māui carries it anyway. Some things are deeper than form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eRed and white\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe palette is saturated, almost violent in its redness — but it's not aggressive. Red here reads as \u003cem\u003ealive\u003c\/em\u003e. Urgent. Blood-warm. The white cuts through it like bone through skin, like the moments where something true breaks the surface.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe blue-purple lines are the connective tissue — the serpentine forms that suggest the crawling, winding path of Māui's final journey. They move the way a lizard moves: low, deliberate, unhurried, lethal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cross-hatched border frames the whole image like a threshold. You're looking at something happening inside a liminal space. Between worlds. Between forms. Between mortal and immortal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eThe moment before\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eMāui's story doesn't end well here — he's crushed by Hine-nui-te-pō before he can complete the act, and death stays in the world because of it. But \u003cem\u003eSurreptitious\u003c\/em\u003e isn't about failure. It's about audacity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt's about a being who looked at what he was and decided to try for something more. Who moved forward into the dark with everything he had, on the chance he might come out the other side transformed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThat's not a myth. That's a decision. One that gets made quietly, privately, before anyone else can see it happening.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003chr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe painting sold. These 25 are the only way into this one.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch4\u003eWhat you're getting\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e420 × 420 mm\u003c\/strong\u003e — a big square. Measure the wall, it's bigger than you think.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eUnframed.\u003c\/strong\u003e Glass breaks in transit and you know your wall better than I do.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGiclée on Hahnemühle Photo Rag — 100% cotton, archival inks. Won't fade.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eShips flat, not rolled. Signed and numbered by hand in the Pōneke studio before it goes.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eFree shipping in Aotearoa.\u003c\/strong\u003e Allow 2–3 weeks — it gets printed for you.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"\/pages\/prints-explained\"\u003eMore about the prints\u003c\/a\u003e · \u003ca href=\"\/pages\/shipping\"\u003eShipping\u003c\/a\u003e · \u003ca href=\"\/pages\/returns\"\u003eReturns\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mawhēriki","offers":[{"title":"420 × 420 mm","offer_id":48151820533945,"sku":"MAV-SUR-LP-420","price":260.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0783\/6231\/2889\/files\/surreptitious.jpg?v=1784247936","url":"https:\/\/mawheriki.shop\/products\/surreptitious-limited-print","provider":"Mawhēriki","version":"1.0","type":"link"}