One mural at a time
A regular on Avenues pages, Watch This Space’s creative director shares his passion for urban art and Christchurch.
Little Street Art Festival tour group, photo by Centuri Chan
If you’ve ever stopped to admire the bursts of colour on city walls or paused on a corner to snap a photo of a miniature urban art piece, chances are you’ve crossed paths with something in the Watch This Space catalogue.
Dr Reuben Woods is the creative director of Watch This Space, Ōtautahi Christchurch’s online map and database cataloguing urban art, from large-scale murals to ephemeral graffiti. But his passion for street art and the community that surrounds it started long before the database.
Reuben’s story is rooted in New Brighton, a place he’s proud to call home. “I hope one of my skill sets is the ability to relate to quite a wide range of people,” he says. “Which is something that I kind of think comes back to growing up here, like in a reasonably unassuming kind of neighbourhood. I’ve played here, grown up, and worked here.”
Before Watch This Space, Reuben managed the local Post Shop and Kiwibank. It was, he says, “probably a perfect introduction to what I do, because I had to work with people from all walks of life.” That foundation in people-focused work translates today into how he approaches urban art: “We try to champion creatives doing cool stuff, but we also really try to make sure we can connect as many people as possible with the experiences that art provides.”
His first connection to art was modest – a few posters and prints around the family home. “We had a Picasso blue-period nude, a Rita Angus print of a barren tree, and a Colin McCahon show poster from the gallery. I can still picture every single one.”
Street art caught his attention in childhood too – not always in the traditional sense. “There was an alleyway where my brother skated. I remember a peace sign and a swastika painted on the asphalt, side by side.” This dichotomy of sorts was seared into his mind as these are marks someone had put there. “It wasn’t necessarily artistic, but it was expression, and that kind of stuck with me.”
Razor Laser Taser’s Smash Palace is an Eyesore from the series The Writing is on the Screen for the LSAF 2024, photo by Centuri Chan; Ling’s Elias, May and Kairau, for the Flare Ōtautahi Street Art Festival 2025, photo by Ling; Drows painting as part of Turn The Cap for the 2025 World Buskers Festival, photo by Centuri Chan.
He went on to study art history but found the curriculum disconnected from his world. “I kept thinking back about what my friends would make of this,” he says. His honours work explored graffiti as public expression – from ancient Rome to Northern Ireland – and laid the groundwork for what came next.
Following the 2011 earthquakes, Reuben returned to a broken city, a blank canvas waiting to be used. “It was clear something was going to happen here.” He proposed a thesis on how street art would evolve in Christchurch. That became a four-year PhD – and a clear marker of how public art could help shape a city’s renewal.
It was during this time that Watch This Space founder Lindsay Chan invited Reuben to contribute. When she stepped down in 2017, Reuben stepped up.
Under his leadership, Watch This Space has become more than a map. It’s a platform, a connector, and a celebration of urban creativity. Becoming a true change-maker, he has helped direct and shape events like Little Street Art Festival, and Shift at the Canterbury Museum. His closing thoughts? Christchurch has embraced its new visual identity – one mural at a time.