The 'Tales from the Māoriland' anthology began in 2007 when Bruce returned to Taranaki and began to paint, keeping his painted narrative under wraps and very much to himself and family until last year's show.

Now, we get to share in another chapter of the story, Series 2, with nine more works that are again provocative, engaging, and promising to challenge and excite. Our previous showing of Jackson's paintings was so well supported, and we anticipate this prequel will be no different.

As a US deserter from the British Army, living uneasily alongside Māori in the late 1860s, Bent becomes a figure who exists at times in both the Māori and Pākeha world but remains estranged from both.

It is this estrangement that fuels Jackson's work, within a landscape portrayed as enchanted and indifferent. In the early 1900s, author James Cowan reimagined Bent as the subject of an epic caper for Pākehā audiences in The Adventures of Kimble Bent. In Not so epic now! he remains a character fraught with complexity and contradiction.

In this complexity comes the figuration of Bent as an old man, captured by history as a man out of time through his only known photograph. Bent lies in an unmarked grave in the South Island.