Artists
Ahsin Ahsin
Ahsin Ahsin is a Hamilton based artist inspired by 1980s animation and pop culture. He has an extensive list of commissioned work and has participated in international art initiatives including a series in India.
Ali Selliman
A local tattooist from Holiday Tattoo Studio, Ali has been throwing up murals in Hamilton for donkeys! A member of Hamilton’s notorious Underwater Collective, Ali’s work is influenced by folk tales, architecture and indigenous cultures.
Askew One
Askew One/Elliot O’Donnell is a self-taught artist from Auckland. He has been an integral part of the scene, organising Auckland’s first graffiti festival, setting up galleries and publishing both a magazine and book profiling New Zealand graffiti artists.
Boris Bandits
Boris Bandits is the collaboration of Gwilym Devery and E Bone, two talented illustrators and muralists hailing from Wellington. Boris Bandits bring a strong and playful graphic style to their work. Their ambitious piece for Boon 2015 depicts a taniwha, wrapping itself around the architecture of the building on Ward Street.
Bruce McLachlan
Local legend Bruce McLachlan is born and bred in the Waikato and currently based in Hamilton. Known for his precise and detailed acrylic paintings, and often inspired by pop culture, Bruce was a key contributor to the Boon 2019 Street Art Festival.
Brya Rose
Brya Rose is a mama, artist and teacher from the McLachlan clan of Kirikiriroa. She explores aspects of popular culture through fine art blurring disciplines across artworks, where graffiti meets painting and illustrations are sculpted into ceramics.
Caitlin Moloney
Caitlin has a love of rich jewel like colours, design and texture. She is captivated by culture and how people live. Caitlin feels that the relationship we as human beings have with the earth, with each other and ourselves is the single most sacred experience of being alive.
Christie Wright
Christie Wright is a Napier-based designer, illustrator and muralist who has left a trail of her bright and fluid murals all over New Zealand during the last few years. She has painted one of our festivals biggest ‘walls’, the Hamilton Central Library.
Charles + Janine
Charles (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi) is a founding member & president of the world championship winning crew TMD (The Most Dedicated), a collective of creatives from around the world who continue to push artistic boundaries.
Cracked Ink
Si Omer AKA Cracked Ink has been involved in both street art and the art gallery scene in New Zealand. He likes to work in the moment, conducive to the medium of aerosol paint and is interested in exploring attitude and expression.
Craig McClure
Craig is a doodler, painter, illustrator, muralist, curator, festival director and project manager. He uniquely employs an amalgamation of illustration with contemporary painting engaging an ethereal undercurrent of symbol and storytelling in his artwork.
Daniel Ormsby
Māori artist Daniel Ormsby’s usual mediums are painting, Whakairo (carving), and Ta Moko (tattooing). Daniel's deeply reflective storytelling is part of a conscious effort to enable Toi Māori visibility in Hamilton’s central community spaces.
Denise Fort
Denise’s art uses detailed, illustrative style and playful storytelling using bold black marker lines, which have become her signature medium. She has been invited to commission several mural works, which now feature on walls, skate bowls, and cafes across the country.
Dinho Bento
Brazilian Artist / Muralist / Illustrator Dinho Bento enriched our city by sharing tales of his Brazilian whakapapa through his signature large-scale mural design.
Enox
Enox aka Iain is another of New Zealand’s proudly homegrown artists. Having already brought his urban contemporary style to a range of other mediums we were delighted to have him bring his crew of energetic and positive characters to the walls of our streets.
Erika Pearce
Aucklander Erika Pearce is a vibrant multi-disciplined artist and a passionate conservationist. We were pleased to invite Erika to Kirikiriroa to tell her inspirational stories of the beauty of both wahine and the natural world.
Flox
A stencil artist with a fine art degree, Flox's trademark native birds, ferns and flowers are a celebration of Aotearoa’s environmental taonga. Using distinctly vibrant colour on a scale combined with delicacy they magically transform grey walls into vibrant depictions of the natural world.
Gina Kiel
Gina Kiel is an artist based in Wellington, New Zealand. She creates feminine yet strong images that exude sensuality and explore the human experience through ideas of life, death, spirituality and pop culture using flowing lines and forms and bold, minimal compositions with a psychedelic palette.
Jeremy Shirley
Jeremy Shirley is one of Hamilton’s best-known muralists and has work spread widely around the city, the country and abroad. His unique style has been making its way around Hamilton before street art was widespread in the city.
Jodie McBride
Jodi McBride is a Hamilton based artist who completed her degree in Media Arts at Wintec. With a passion for illustration, her work combines soft pastels and vibrant pop colours. She re-imagines everyday situations in quirky and playful ways.
Kalani Lanusi
A budding part of the local art community, Kalani has completed the beloved Duck Island mural as her first big wall. For BOON she was interested in telling stories of her South American whakapapa.
Kelcy Taratoa
Kelcy is from Aotearoa |New Zealand. Cultural identity, popular culture, technology and science fiction have been the source for many of his works. 2019 saw a shift towards the conceptual and abstract territory of Māori customary art forms and a concept within te ao Maori, te kore, te-wiwia - a space without boundaries. Te kore, te-wiwia is centred in grey space thinking - away from absolutes.
Kell Sunshine
Kell is a multidisciplinary Kiwi artist with a focus on street art in a bright, fresh palette. We were keen to bring her back to Hamilton after her graceful work on a temporary wall resonated strongly with our community. For her 2019’s work she collaborated with local spoken-word poet Michael Moore to create something a bit different.
Kieran Horner
Kieran Horner aka ‘Point Chev’ is a Kirikiriroa local and Wintec graduate who works as a fulltime tattooist at Holiday Tattoo alongside two other local artists. Despite specialising in black and grey work he was more than happy to pick up a paintbrush and help us bring some colour and fun to the walls of Hamilton City.
Liam Bourton
Liam uses geometric abstraction in his artworks and has a systematical, and mathematical approach to making art. With his headphones on, a pen in his hand, and a canvas in front of him he zones out the world, becoming absorbed in his art, and finding his happy place.
Melinda Butt
Melinda Butt is an artist on a mission, sharing BOON’s belief in the power of art to transform and enhance communities' experience of everyday spaces. Melinda brought her geometric shapescapes to Kirikiriroa in the Boon Street Art Festival 2019.
Mica Still
Mica creates awareness imagery around various health/mental conditions so you can help spread the knowledge and love. Mica’s art work will sneak up and frighten you in your dreams while making you laugh out loud in the light of day.
Pauly B
Pauly B is a Hamilton based muralist, painter, and performer of live art. His art responds to the connections between people that are constantly happening throughout the city.
Pounamu
Pounamu Wharekawa (Ngai te Rangi, they / themme / ia) is an angry indigenous bad bitch, fine artist, illustrator and muralist. They make art that speaks about intersections of identity through the lens of a queer, small town turned urban Māori living their best boring life in the big smoke of Kirikiriroa.
Poihakena Ngāwati
Poihakena Ngāwati is a Hamiltonian, muralist and Wintec graduate with a number of impressive works around Hamilton.
Rach Kiddie
Rachel is an artist, a mother of two toddlers, a wife, a reader, a craft-maker, and an introverted homebody who uses combinations of bold block colour, pattern, text, illustration and symbolism to tell stories and explore humour in everyday life.
Regan Balzer
Regan has spent her life-time learning. A High School teacher in Mathematics and Art, Regan had her first solo exhibition in 20015 at Hei Tiki Gallery in Rotorura. She has gone on to exhibit throughout New Zealand, Italy, Australia, America, Rarotonga and Tahiti. She is particularly interested in the ability to connect people and share stories through her her work.
Sean Duffell
Sean Duffell is known for his large abstract murals inspired by NZ flora, fauna, insects and reptiles. His art can be found on walls and in public spaces all around Auckland and Wellington.
Siren
Siren (Jacob Chrisohoou) is a multi-disciplinary freelance artist. Through art and hip-hop Jacob encourages young people to positively develop themselves towards a positive and productive future.
Stephen Templer
Wellingtonian Stephen Templer is an artist, performer, painter and prop designer with a gift for collaboration. He agrees strongly about the power of the arts to bring vibrancy to New Zealand communities.
T Wei
T Wei is a Wellington based artist whose particular style is pop-surrealism.
His piece responds to the Waikato river in particular reflecting on the importance of the awa itself and the eels within it. The fisherman’s head is a bucket that is holding the eels. It's a playful reflection of its surroundings.
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Techs & Hine+
Poihakena Ngāwati and his partner Hana Maihi (aka Techs and Hine+) are known in Hamilton for their collaborating on the vast ‘Te Hono Ki Matariki’ mural that graces Wintec’s Anglesea St wall.
Te Haunui Tuna
Te Haunui Tuna grew up admiring art and was always found with a pencil in hand drawing pictures and entering local art competitions. Later on, he started to experiment with painting, air brushing, tattooing, sculpting, using ink pens and digital programmes to create new art work.
Te-Marunui-Hotene
Te Marunui's extensive art practice considers creative practice as both a reflection of and method to facilitate healing in Urban Māori identity. Aiming to visualize the process of going from 'blackness to taha Maori' in a series of artworks as a healing tool for himself and for others processing a similar journey.
Tony Diaz
Multidisciplinary Californian artist Tony Diaz painted our first BOON brokerage wall in January 2020 before bringing his highly detailed style to Boon Street Art Festival 2020, with a little bit of help from his father Mike.
Trustme
Trustme (Ross Liew) is an Auckland based artist. His mural sitting close to the Waikato River, responds to the Waikato whakatauki “Waikato Taniwharau, He piko, he taniwha, He piko, he taniwha.”
Underwater Collective
The Underwater Collective is a collaborative group of artists from the Waikato who create object-based installations. Their artwork collides everyday icons with wild dream-scape imaginings.
Xavier Tapp
Xavier Tapp is a geometric artist based in Kirikiriroa. He is incredibly inspired by brutalist architecture and optical illusion in geometric abstraction. He creates art to immerse himself in a creative vibrant world which is a continuous exploration of visual perception in optical art.
