Employing a sombre new palette of blue and black, he painted the first in what would become a major series of skyscapes -- vast, nocturnal spaces where birds speed and plummet. The Hanging Sky brings together highlights from this period with four distinctive new responses. New York essayist Eliot Weinberger offers a poetic meditation on what he calls 'the ghosts of birds' in Cotton's paintings. Christchurch Art Gallery senior curator Justin Paton plots his own encounters with Cotton across six years in which the artist was constantly 'finding space'. Melbourne-based curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow confronts the haunting role of Toi moko -- tattooed Māori heads -- in the paintings and in her own past. And Institute of Modern Art Director Robert Leonard argues the case for Cotton as a cultural surrealist exploring 'the treachery of images'."--www.craigpotton.co.nz