Vincent Ward is a New Zealand artist and award-winning filmmaker, internationally recognised for his ability to convey powerful emotional and psychological experiences through the use of moving image. His experimental mixed-media work explores the terrain where movement, paint and film collide. In both film and art Ward engages in a visceral visual language exploring moments of transformation, psychic states and our relationship with the physical world, explored in the 2011 U.S. publication on his work ‘Making the Transformational Moment in Film’ by Michael Wiese Productions.
Ward’s films have received international acclaim at both the Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival. In 1999 Ward developed with his team a motion painting aesthetic that lead to an Academy Award for best visual effects for his film ‘What Dreams May Come.’ Ward has continued to build on these techniques; in 2007 receiving the New Zealand Order of Merit (NZOM) for his services to film, and ensuring his practice remains at the forefront of innovation in this area. Ward’s extensive experience in the film industry greatly informs much of his artistic practice.
Ward has exhibited widely since 2012, commencing with a large solo exhibition ‘Breath’ curated by Rhana Devenport for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand. It included a ten-screen immersive cinematic installation, photography, and large mixed-media works on canvas. Later that year Ward became the first New Zealander to participate at the Shanghai Biennale. As a guest of renowned Chinese video artist and curator, Qiu Zhijie, Ward held a solo pavilion show in an historic former cathedral on the Bund.
A guest professorship at the China Academy of Art, School of Fine Arts, Hanzhou, has been conferred on Ward, and he also runs workshops on new media at Shanghai University, School of Fine Arts. Ward is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canterbury where he was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts; the same university where he first studied art and completed a Dip FA (Hons) in 1978.
Ward lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.
