Ōtautahi artist and designer Nathan Ingram, has developed a diverse and shifting body of work since capturing the public imagination with range of post-quake street art interventions a decade ago. Since harnessing the physical and conceptual potential of the streets as a site for creative expression and recognising the power in such public acts, Ingram’s work has boldly explored new forms, spaces and intentions in the following years, continuing to take inspiration from this urban foundation but pushing in unexpected directions. His work can now be considered part of the global emergence of the urban contemporary category, an artist whose work combines refined studio practice with an underlying, and undeniable, urban energy.   

An inquisitive approach to process has led to an adventurous creative output that explores settings, styles, materials, and techniques. Investigating formal and gestural abstraction, his work extends from geometric and gestural mural designs that spread across vertical walls and horizontal terrains, to a fastidious studio practice that celebrates subtle detail.  Grounded in the potentials of line, colour, surface and texture, Ingram’s studio work juxtaposes the influence of the energetic flux of the urban environment with a fixation on repetitive refinement. Ingram’s paintings are at once chaotic and ordered, still and dynamic, carefully composed yet open to chance.  

Ingram’s ‘layered’ works, which serve to both define, suggest, reveal and conceal, are studies in form and mark making. Painted on glass and utilising both sides of the plane (at times layered to heighten spatial dynamics), we become aware of the tension between perfectly finished surfaces and fluid mark-making techniques. The hand of the artist is both vitally central and seemingly absent, a combination of slick, machine-like optimisation, itself an effect achieved through great care, and the intriguing detail of lines pulled across surfaces and layered with aerosol, often created with a spontaneity that embraces chance.  The more painterly variations echo painted walls, but are in fact, viewed in reverse, the entire process of creation flipped on its head, sections built up in a way that belies our initial intuition. Colours range from bold and deep to softer pastel tones, harnessed for their relationships to each other and the resulting impulse. In the more minimalist productions, surfaces of flat grey, bright white and softer yellows are wiped into, like a foggy mirror, piquing our interest with what may lie beyond. In the more detailed compositions, the undefined blocks of grey, pink, blue, red and orange are over written, the ‘squiggles’ now obscuring our field of enquiry.  

The ‘squiggle’, as Ingram has dubbed the recurring motif in his work, has become an evolving element, used for different effects and insinuations. Rendered from manual exertions, at once both measured and energetic, the alternating length, thickness and direction of these looping lines give them an individual quality, each a distinct manifestation of a gestural impulse. The squiggles find their pure form in the artist’s latest series, the ‘shadow floats’, metal cut-out forms slickly powder-coated and lifted off the walls on which they sit, almost glowing. The cut-out effect adds a sense of suggested movement, as if the squiggles have been drawn in front of us. These works are a natural progression, refining the squiggle motif while making the world around us the backdrop for us to consider, the artist’s mark-making coming full circle.  

Ultimately, Ingram’s work is a balancing act, where the careful (and yet adventurous) combination and juxtaposition of formal elements ensure inspection and reflection are more important than interpretation.  

Nathan Ingram’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around Aotearoa and overseas, held in notable collections, including the Wrightmann Collection and Canterbury Museum. His most recent exhibition, Archetypes, a collaboration with figurative painter Jessie Rawcliffe at  Fiksate Gallery, was featured in Art New Zealand. His public works and commissions span various cities, working with significant public organisations, commercial entities and private patrons. Ingram has also been included in festivals such as Taupo’s Graffiato (2021) and Ōtautahi’s Spectrum (2015), Flare Street Art Festival (2021) and Canterbury Museum’s SHIFT exhibition (2023). 

- Dr. Reuben Woods - 2023