Simon Ingram at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery

Order and randomness play off one another to create the patterns in Simon Ingram's paintings. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Mixed among the paint tubes and brushes in Simon Ingram's studio are plastic Lego blocks, metal rods and clamps, wires and yellow boxes with rudimentary controls.

These are the "consumer grade" robotics kits Ingram uses to construct self-painting artworks.

Several of these machines will be on display at Ingram's show at Vavasour-Godkin Gallery in High St from today.

Tonight's opening will feature a "painting performance" in which a brush cradled on an x-y plotter will dip into a paint pot and put a dot on a board a set number of times, working its way up and across the surface according to a simple program.

The rest of the works Ingram has painted, filling in grids with colour according to limited sets of rules.

Both his machines and his works draw on computer science theories of artificial life. An example is Langton's Ant, a program written in the 1980s. The ant starts out on a grid containing black and white cells. If it is on a black square, it turns right 90 degrees and moves forward one unit. If the ant is on a white square, it turns left 90 degrees and moves forward one unit. When the ant leaves a square, it inverts the colour. Ingram says by appropriating such rules, he turns himself into a sort of painting machine.

"I have this diagramming tool, this thing that simulates biological reproduction. I import this into paintings, call it a kind of content provider, and use it to generate patterning in paintings, so order and randomness play off one another.

"A viewer, if they care to, might sense some kind of logic in the system, some kind of life."

The paintings, though, are not mechanical, paint-by-numbers exercises. Ingram chooses the rules, the colours, the way he paints them, the consistency of the paint. Some colours may bleed, others blob.

"I misapply the rules, I get confused. When I am working close up among this forest of squares, it gets very confusing. I am being a failed conceptualist," he says.

Ingram's work is heavily influenced by his experiences in Australia, where he lived from 1995 to 2001.

In New Zealand there is a split between formalists, who emphasise the way a work is made, and conceptualists, who under the influence of Billy Apple tend towards a dry, rationalist practice.

"When I got to Sydney the artist-run gallery scene was going strong and it seemed to me abstraction was coming from a different place - it was not coming from any attempt to find pseudo-spiritualist qualities but from the Russian formalists like Malevich. The starting point was a painting was essentially an object first."

Ingram's response was Spirit Level Painting, a yellow square with a spirit level attached.

"It carried information about its own state, so it had self-awareness or self-consciousness. It was not telling you everything about itself but it was telling you something about itself. It was this idea of finding some kind of knowledge system."

Another important experience in Sydney was a gallery labouring job, helping hang a show of work by French artist Yves Klein, whose working methods included getting models to cover themselves in blue paint and roll round on paper or canvas. "It made me realise art could be sensual."

Ingram says after returning to New Zealand he moved to a painterly kind of conceptualism. "I am interested in matter, in materials doing the thinking. It's very like action painting, there is a sense you start something, and if anything goes wrong, you try to right it, and there is a resolution - 'I should probably stop now, because if I go further I might ruin this'. There is also a sense sometimes I have to go further, because if not, it is undercooked.

"This is a kind of theatre where the system would seem to make all the decisions, but it is not really, it is more a case of my subjectivity or my sense of aesthetics pushed up against the system, and the friction between these two things.

"Systemisation helps me get round some of the problems of being an abstract expressionist, but allows me to be one at the same time."

Exhibition

*What: Garden, by Simon Ingram

*Where and when: Vavasour Godkin Gallery, 35 High St, to Apr 23