The prestigious Rydal Art Award winner tells Canvas the personal story behind her art.
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Artist Ruth Ige.
The ethereal works of painter Ruth Ige ripple with sensitivity and hope. Yet, behind the mysterious figures lies a multitude of meanings and mysteries, writes Ginny Fisher.
Ruth Ige appears like a vision in blue in her driveway in the Hibiscus Coast suburb of Red Beach. The artist is almost
fully dressed in indigo, her matching Nigerian dress and pants paired with green leather slip-on shoes and a necklace of painted beads from Kenya.
Smiling widely as she shows me through to the back garden, Ige says colour is only one factor that drives her style.
“I always try to wear Nigerian and other African brands; it helps me feel connected to my culture. It’s also the way I support other artisans and designers,” she says, guiding me through her studio door.
Tucked like a secret into the back of the property, the converted garage is a sanctuary-like space with an adjoining reading room where books form small towers and objects from Nigeria – baskets, beads and her own small paintings – cover the shelves and walls.
In the studio area, the floors are covered with paint-splattered rattan floor mats, containers full of powdery pigments and a sturdy odó – a traditional wooden mortar and pestle Ige uses to mix pigments with water or shea butter, depending on the consistency and painterly result she’s after.
We sit cross-legged on the mat. Ige plucks out packets of pigments she collects from online grocery stores here, and in the UK and the US. Some are used in cooking or for fabric dyeing or self-care.
“I find it powerful to paint with materials that are also used in the daily lives of Nigerians or Africans from the diaspora all over the world. That way, the paintings become like archives.”
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME. Ruth Ige, Safe Journeys (And you had the ability to travel through dimensions, times and realms), 2026, Acrylic paint, alligator pepper, dried ugu leaves, blue spirulina on canvas, 60.69 × 60.69 cm.
The artist pinches camwood pigment she sourced from a UK online grocery store. Reaching into the bag, she sifts the reddish-hued powder from the wood of West African trees through her fingers. The pigment is not only used for painting and textile dyeing, but in soap and pastes for traditional African beauty routines, such as calming skin masks or for ceremonial body art.
There are many tribes in Nigeria, she explains, each with its unique rituals – Ige has Yoruba heritage from her father, and Igbo heritage on her mother’s side. Yoruba people have traditionally used camwood pigment for rites of passage and body ornamentation, and she’s wondering whether this earthy red hue might be the next colour she introduces into her paintings.
A colour change would be dramatic for the artist. Anyone familiar with her distinctive blue paintings knows this hue has been a defining element of her work in the past decade – specifically West African indigo pigment from a species of shrub commonly known as elu in Yoruba.
“Indigo is an important pigment in Yoruba culture. It represents love, protection, sorrow and new life – the idea of wishing you well.”
Ige was born in Ilé-Ifé, Nigeria, in 1992, but left for Botswana with her parents and sister before moving permanently to New Zealand 23 years ago. Today, she sees her artmaking as a way to reconnect with her heritage.
When her family arrived in New Zealand, the Nigerian community was virtually non-existent, she says, and the most recent 2023 census estimates the community is 5000-people strong.
“It’s the little things that matter; we have only recently been able to order Nigerian groceries here, there’s even a Nigerian restaurant in Northcote. It’s pretty good too!”
Ruth Ige, The Evocation of Worlds, 2026, Acrylic paint on canvas, 180mmx 200mm stretched and 23 metres unstretched.
The new access to home goods has prompted Ige to consider other interesting plant-based materials she could use in her painting concoctions, like dried ugu, uziza and bitterleaf leaves, also used in Nigerian cooking and tea. She mixes them with fixatives and adds them to her paint to create textured, mottled surfaces that ripple with movement.
“I’m interested in the slippage between the everyday usages for these pigments and leaves, and their more sacred uses.”
Shea butter is another unexpected material that crosses the boundary from holistic to painterly. It’s a popular self-care product in African countries and, by using it in her painting, Ige references moments of rest and reconnection.
Since graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Auckland University of Technology in 2016, the 34-year-old has been on a steady artistic trajectory, with a string of successful shows here and abroad, including exhibitions in New York, Cuba, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Art Basel Miami, Frieze London and last year at the 36th Sao Paulo Biennale.
Last year, in Auckland, Ige won the prestigious Rydal Art Award, one of our most lucrative art prizes, with a biennial award of $25,000.
She says the money has given her the freedom to go full force with her research.
“My practice deals with pre-colonial Nigerian and African practices, and many of the books and documentation are gathered from all over the world, so they can be costly and tricky to find.”
Her first institutional show, titled The Evocation of Worlds, is currently open at Te Uru Gallery in Auckland, while halfway across the world, another new show, Woven Realms, has just opened with Ko Artspace in Lagos.
Ruth Ige, A Waking Dream, 2026, Shea butter, indigo pigment, osùn camwood) powder, nzu clay, ultramarine blue, amala flour, baobab powder on canvas, 214 × 233 cm.
Her show at Te Uru, like all her work to date, explores her culture, identity and sense of belonging. Her mythical paintings revolve around representations of Black female figures. Faces are left deliberately blank and sometimes there is no figure at all, just a hand. Although the figures are Black and female, faces are deliberately left blank, leaving space for interpretation.
“I see the figures as multiple ways of being,” Ige says, adding that they mimic people’s natural duality.
“When you think about it, we don’t share every part of ourselves. Are they old, young or from the future?” she says of the figures.
“In protecting the figure, I am concealing and revealing different parts of her. Their mystery is a form of empowerment.”
The figures often wear ethereal clothing – ruffles or more formal garments and occasionally embellished with wings. Ige sees them as time travellers representing the past, present and future, referencing African history. They simultaneously mourn the wounds of colonisation, celebrate fashion and culture, and reflect the diaspora, with an estimated 200 to 350 million people of African descent living outside the African continent.
Ige will often begin a new body of work with a poem, but the rest of the process is more intuitive.
“Some come quickly, others I wrestle with,” she says, describing the process as an outlet and healing escape.
Ruth Ige, And the waters carried her songs, acrylic paint on canvas, 60.69 x 91.44 cm, 2026.
Once in front of the canvas, Ige’s painterly process is loose and instinctive. Recently, she has explored expanding the borders of a painting, allowing the canvas to cascade onto the floor or unfold, testing pictorial boundaries and hinting at associations with traditional fabrics.
Beyond poetry, Ige also draws on photography, specifically historic African portraits, to inspire her figures. “I’m interested in how culture is shown through fashion, adornments, and fabrics,” she explains, but adds that the figures themselves are fictional and designed to prompt the viewer’s imagination.
“Some are from the past, some from the future. Some are ancestors, some are ordinary people, and some have extraordinary abilities.”
As for her own powerful artistic abilities, Ige sees painting not just as a practice, but a mindset.
