Surreptitious — Limited Print
Surreptitious — Limited Print
Edition of 25 · The original is gone
The Sneak
Surreptitious — the word itself moves like its subject. Quiet. Sideways. Already inside before you noticed the door was open.
This 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.
The painting doesn't show the ending. It shows the in-between. The transformation. The sneaking.
Why Māui
I came to this story personally.
For 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.
When 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.
Māui didn't shape-shift into something foreign. He shape-shifted into a form that was already his. That's what this transition felt like. Not becoming someone else — becoming more completely myself.
This 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.
A new face for tiki
At 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.
If Māui was a shape-shifter — he atua, he tangata, he manu, he ngārara — then his tiki form shouldn't be fixed either. It should look like something caught mid-change. Something that hasn't settled yet.
That 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.
He atua. He tangata. He manu. He ngārara.
These four phrases appear directly in the work, scattered across the canvas like labels on a being that refuses a single category:
- He atua — a god
- He tangata — a person
- He manu — a bird
- He ngārara — a reptile, a creature, an insect
These 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.
And 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.
Māui wasn't pretending to be a bird. He was a bird. And then he was something else.
The 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.
The jawbone
Inside the mouth of the central form — look closely — the jawbone is there.
This is Te Kauae o Murirangawhenua, 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.
The puhoro, stitched
On 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.
Puhoro 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.
Red and white
The palette is saturated, almost violent in its redness — but it's not aggressive. Red here reads as alive. Urgent. Blood-warm. The white cuts through it like bone through skin, like the moments where something true breaks the surface.
The 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.
The 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.
The moment before
Māui'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 Surreptitious isn't about failure. It's about audacity.
It'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.
That's not a myth. That's a decision. One that gets made quietly, privately, before anyone else can see it happening.
The painting sold. These 25 are the only way into this one.
What you're getting
- 420 × 420 mm — a big square. Measure the wall, it's bigger than you think.
- Unframed. Glass breaks in transit and you know your wall better than I do.
- Giclée on Hahnemühle Photo Rag — 100% cotton, archival inks. Won't fade.
- Ships flat, not rolled. Signed and numbered by hand in the Pōneke studio before it goes.
- Free shipping in Aotearoa. Allow 2–3 weeks — it gets printed for you.