Painter Ruth Ige greets visitors in head-to-toe indigo — a Nigerian dress and matching pants, Kenyan beaded necklace, green leather shoes. The colour is no accident. For the past decade, blue has defined her work, specifically West African indigo pigment from a shrub the Yoruba call elu. In her hands, it stands for love, protection, sorrow and new life.
Ige, born in Ilé-Ifé, Nigeria, in 1992, moved to New Zealand 23 years ago and now works from a converted garage studio on the Hibiscus Coast, north of Auckland. Her materials read like a Nigerian pantry: she orders pigments from online grocery stores in New Zealand, the UK and the US, then grinds them with an odó — a traditional wooden mortar and pestle — mixing them with water or shea butter. Camwood pigment, used in Yoruba rites of passage and skin masks, may be her next colour. Dried ugu, uziza and bitterleaf leaves, staples of Nigerian cooking, go into her paint to create textured, mottled surfaces. As she puts it, paintings made from materials people actually live with become a kind of archive.
Her figures are deliberately enigmatic. Black women with blank faces — or sometimes just a hand, or nothing at all — appear in ruffles, formal garments, occasionally wings. Ige calls them time travellers, spanning past, present and future, mourning colonisation's wounds while celebrating African fashion and the global diaspora, estimated at 200 to 350 million people. The mystery, she says, is a form of empowerment.
The recognition is rolling in. After graduating from Auckland University of Technology in 2016, Ige showed in New York, Cuba, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Art Basel Miami, Frieze London and the 36th Sao Paulo Biennale. She won the $25,000 Rydal Art Award in Auckland last year, money she is pouring into costly research on pre-colonial Nigerian practices. Now her first institutional exhibition, The Evocation of Worlds, is open at Te Uru Gallery in Auckland — with a simultaneous show, Woven Realms, opening with Ko Artspace in Lagos.
Why should travellers care? It's a rare chance to see one of New Zealand's most exciting emerging artists at an intimate west Auckland gallery, in a show exploring identity, heritage and belonging. It also pairs neatly with Auckland's growing Nigerian footprint — around 5,000 people per the 2023 census, with Nigerian groceries now available and even a Nigerian restaurant in Northcote worth trying before or after your gallery visit. Art lovers flying through Auckland have a short window to catch a painter who is very likely headed for bigger stages.
