PROVENANCE Private Collection, Sydney Purchased from Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, 2004

Shane Cotton completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury's Ilam School of Fine Arts in 1988 and a Graduate Diploma in Teaching from the Christchurch College of Education in 1991. In 1993, Cotton joined Robert Jahnke in lecturing on Massey University's Toioho ki Āpiti Bachelor of Māori Visual Arts programme.

His painting practice examines Maori and Pakeha cultural histories to prompt conversations about nationhood and biculturalism, often referencing early nineteenth-century Maori folk art and its intersection with Christianity.

In 1988, Cotton was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago; in 1999 he was awarded a Te Tohu Mahi Hou a Te Waka Toi/Te Waka Toi Award for New Work; becoming an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2008.

The Seven Sisters are a series of chalk sea cliffs on the English Channel coast, and are a stretch of the sea-eroded section of the South Downs range of hills, in the county of East Sussex, in south-east England.

The cliffs run between the mouth of the River Cuckmere near Seaford, and the chalk headland of Beachy Head outside of Eastbourne. The dips or swales that separate each of the seven crests from the next are the remnants of dry valleys in the chalk South Downs which are being gradually eroded by the sea.