Six years separate We Come in Peace and Shoot to Kill, yet the two works feel like consecutive chapters in the same miniature war. The same magnificent red tin robot towers over an army of tiny green soldiers, but somewhere between 2014 and 2020 the mood has changed. What begins as an uneasy encounter has escalated into something far more formidable.
In We Come in Peace, #35 in the 1 in 100 series, the confrontation takes place on a quiet suburban footpath. The setting could hardly be more peaceful: clipped hedges, immaculate lawns, modest houses and a vast turquoise sky filled with beautifully illuminated clouds. Against this familiar New Zealand suburbia, the enormous red robot appears gloriously out of place. Below him, a procession of toy soldiers advances along the pavement, accompanied by a motorcycle and artillery. One fallen soldier lies at the robot’s feet, his radio beside him. The title “We Come in Peace” immediately introduces the joke. Nothing about the advancing military force looks particularly peaceful.
The robot, however, remains strangely passive. Brilliant red against the greens and blues surrounding him, he stands upright and motionless, apparently observing the tiny army approaching from the left. His scale makes him potentially terrifying, yet his unmistakable identity as a vintage tin toy makes him equally nostalgic and endearing. The painting plays with childhood imagination, in which a footpath can become a battlefield, and toys of completely different sizes can suddenly inhabit the same world.
In Shoot to Kill, #65 in the series, painted in 2020, that imaginary world has become considerably more complicated. The quiet suburban street has disappeared, and the action has moved into the backyard, where towering grass transforms an ordinary garden into dense jungle. The red robot returns, but now he is surrounded. Soldiers swarm across the ground with jeeps, artillery, missile launchers and other military equipment, while a helicopter hovers overhead. Even another red robot appears partially dismantled or incapacitated among the chaos.
Colour strengthens the contrast between the paintings. In We Come in Peace, the expansive turquoise sky and luminous clouds evoke openness and optimism, while the robot’s brilliant red serves as the dominant visual punctuation. In Shoot to Kill, the palette closes around the figures. Deep greens and shadows create a claustrophobic battlefield, making the same red robot appear even more exposed. The visual language has shifted from encounter to siege.
The titles complete the narrative. “We come in peace” is one of science fiction’s great declarations of supposedly friendly intent; “shoot to kill” is its brutal opposite. Between those phrases lies an entire imagined history. Perhaps negotiations failed. Perhaps nobody trusted anybody in the first place. Or perhaps, as happens so easily in childhood games, yesterday’s visitor became today’s enemy.
Together, the paintings celebrate the extraordinary seriousness with which children once played. Plastic soldiers, tin robots, grass, concrete and a suburban garden required no digital effects to become an epic world. Six years apart, these two works demonstrate one of the enduring pleasures of 1 in 100: memory does not merely recreate childhood. It gives childhood’s imagination another chance to continue the story.
