New Zealander Peter Robinson is one of that nation's leading artists, producing paintings and sculptures known for challenging institutional constructions of ethnicity and value. Part Maori by birth, Robinson is considered a Maori artist and concentrated early in his career on work exploring the complex territory of post-colonial politics in Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand.

In the last decade, however, Robinson's work has taken a sculptural turn, with his work playing out familiar figurative elements from his paintings on a new and puzzling scale. One strand of this body of work employed polystyrene as a construction material.

This artist book considers the life of one such sculpture, Ack—at once ice-floe and intestine—and the painting that was made and shelved in parallel.