There's a hotel in central Christchurch that's genuinely hard to walk past. A mural runs the full height of it, it feels like something between a dream and a fever, and it belongs to JacobYikes, who completed it in under four weeks from a scissor lift he'd rather not think about too much going forward.
Jacob Ryan has been a fixture in the Ōtautahi creative scene for close to two decades. He came up through graffiti, painting under the name Yikes, before folding that into a fine arts degree and eventually merging the two into a single practice that moves between city walls and gallery spaces. His work is open-ended, and he'd rather you brought your own meaning to it than have him spell it out.
He's become one of the more recognisable names in a city that has quietly built one of the best street art scenes in Aotearoa, and his recent work has gone up on Phantom bollards across the country, from Wellington to Christchurch. With nearly forty studio pieces in various stages and solo shows on the horizon, we caught up with Jacob in Ōtautahi to talk about his recent mural for Flare Festival, how Christchurch facilitates street artists, and what he's building toward over the coming years.
I go under the name Jacob Yikes. Most people know me as a mural artist, but I also work within fine art and gallery exhibitions. I've got a home studio, and that's where most of the painting happens when I'm not on a wall. The work is probably somewhere between surrealism and abstraction. I came from graffiti originally, I just went by Yikes, and about fifteen years ago the two sides of that merged into one thing. They feed into each other now.
A bit, yeah. The street stuff was self-taught, so the degree gave me a framework to work things out more deliberately. I haven't had to flash the certificate at anyone, but having that training, especially for navigating the gallery side, has genuinely helped. They're pretty different worlds. Being able to move through both has been useful.
Honestly I think I was always going to end up here. I come from a fairly creative family, so there was never any real pushback. But I did work other jobs for a while, and working those settled it for me. It made it obvious what I actually wanted to be doing within the arts. Being in Christchurch helped too. There are real opportunities here, it's a city where you can actually make a living from this if you work at it.
The building owner was pretty much up for whatever I wanted to do, which was great. I submitted the design thinking there was no way they'd say yes that quickly, and then within a couple of days it was all go. The design process took longer than you'd think, it had to be precise enough that I could actually replicate it on the wall, so it ended up being a full digital painting rather than a sketch. The execution was fast though, mostly because the scissor lift was costing about a thousand dollars a day to hire, so I was definitely moving. The response has been really good though. A few people online thought it was demonic, which I found pretty funny.
Yeah, for sure. The scene here is tight. Everyone kind of knows each other, which means there's a level of respect that you don't always find in bigger cities. Post-earthquake Christchurch needed people to make it feel alive again, and a lot of that happened through art, through murals and through festivals. What they've built here for artists is genuinely out of this world. The council is getting behind it too, it feels like something that's still growing.
Completely different headspaces. Murals are planned through scale, logistics, weather, sometimes a whole crew. Studio work is freestyle. I don't start with a blueprint. I'll have five or six pieces on the go at once and just move between them, letting ideas carry across from one to the next. It stops any single painting from getting overworked. If something's not clicking, I just move on and come back. The work figures itself out.
My last solo show was in 2023, and I needed a break from that after doing two years of shows back to back. But now I'm building again properly. The plan is to push this body of work into several galleries, not just Christchurch. I am super interested in displaying work in Wellington, Auckland, the North Island more broadly. I'm also thinking about how the work exists as a full experience rather than just paintings on walls. I want to bring people into the actual headspace of making it, rather than just presenting them with the finished thing. That feels like the next step.
Just that they feel something. I deliberately leave things open, I don't want to tell people what it means. Something might mean one thing to me and something completely different to whoever's looking at it. If it sticks with them, if it makes them feel anything at all, that's the job done.
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