Ammon Ngakuru
Weather Paintings

Weather Paintings features a new body of work by Tāmaki Makaurau-based painter Ammon Ngakuru. Describing his works as illustrations not bound by any narrative logic, these images chart remembered sightings and found images, changes in atmospheric conditions and plant matter as it flowered and withered over the latter months of 2021. Together, they build less towards a diaristic record than a series of questions about what gets sedimented upon the everyday: about how histories, climatic conditions, systems of naming and structures of power might inform how one looks, and what one sees. Here, as with elsewhere in his practice, Ammon negotiates where and how the artist is positioned within the production of meaning, resisting an easily parsable biographical reading of an artistic output, while asking what facets of an identity might find themselves untranslatable within the context of an exhibition or a book: what, that is, as a matter of subterfuge or reticence, might appear only as a trace or gesture. Alongside Ngakuru’s works sits a new text by writer Will Pollard, as well as an extended conversation between Ngakuru and artist and researcher Ngahuia Harrison, which expands on the concerns that have driven the artist’s practice over the last five years.

Texts by Ngahuia Harrison, Ammon Ngakuru, Will Pollard
Designed by Eva Charlton
Edited by Simon Gennard
80 pages, 200 x 263 mm, soft cover
ISBN 978-0-473-63425-4