Simon Ingram

Simon Ingram is a pākehā artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. His painting explores interactions and potentials between artist and machine and is part of a tradition of artists and writers who enrol systems and generative constraints within their work.

In Pictorial fictions – painting from Frances Hodgkins’ latent space, Ingram customises and trains a machine learning tool using a group of nineteen works by Frances Hodgkins held in Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s collection, exploring the categories of interiors and portraits, rural scenes and farming, and harbour and port landscapes. From there, Ingram produces fictional Hodgkins-like compositions, segments them into twenty-five chromatic zones with another tool, before interpreting them as paintings in a slow and deliberative method.

In colour, space, machinic-practice, and the deliberate attentiveness of touch and human interpretation, Ingram establishes a transhistorical fictional dialogue with Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant international modernist painter, Frances Hodgkins.