Public realm artist Mike Hewson
One of the many moments to capture attention at the 2024 Firth NZILA Tuia Pito Ora Wānanga on 16-17 May was Mike Hewson’s turn at the microphone.
If landscape architecture can be described as a genre, then Mike’s mahi exists in a genre-bending space – melding his solidly Cantabrian background in civil engineering with the Visual Arts MFA he earnt from Columbia University, New York, into a heady mix of public realm installations and highly tactile artistic abstractions.
Mike Hewson and a montage of his work.
NZILA co-chair John Potter spoke at the opening of the Wānanga about the shared drive in the room for “harnessing the skills we possess”, and Mike is certainly an exemplar of that as amply evidenced when you look at his website.
It was interesting to hear Mike’s motivations for moving into his flexible modes of practice. The Christchurch earthquake had been a catalyst as well as the inspiration of having practising artists in his family background.
Mike spoke at length about his unconventional approach to playspaces, and how this arose as a sidebar to his 2018 project in Wollongong, Australia. The permanent but movable public artwork Mike created comprised multiple elements (palm tree, carved sandstone, structural steel and other materials) across a 230-metre expanse of Woolongong’s Crown Street Mall. Intended primarily as a re-amenifying of the space and as public sculpture, it soon became obvious that children saw many of its elements as a ready-made adventure playground. As Mike put it: “Children will climb anything”.
Woolongong’s Crown Street Mall
Two years later Mike more consciously concentrated on another combination of sculpture park and playspace. Named St Peters Fences, the finished project comprised a Jengo-jumble of front-yard, street-facing fences carefully reconstructed from archive images of homes demolished to make way for major infrastructure expansion projects. in the St Peters area of greater Sydney.
The vast majority of materials in the park, including all of the bricks, had been salvaged from local homes and structures – in the words of writer Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley “reclaiming what has gone”. Achieving the final outcome was not straightforward. Mike admitted he burnt the hours to get it done, and at first was not popular with his brickies – “they hated me at the start because I made it so they couldn’t use a level”.
Underpinning and flowing through all of Mike’s work are philosophies related to the way that ‘out the gate’ projects like these come about through enabling new principles of working that push past having only one ‘right way’ of doing things.
In one of Mike’s bios his creations are self-described as “sensible strange and risk-positive”, quite DIY and build as you go. His presentation slides about risk were popular with the NZILA Wānanga audience, setting out a duality that applies to most projects. One of Mike’s hand-drawn diagrams gave a logical breakdown of choices. Risk averse or risk-seeking? Anti-nepotism or work with your mates and “work crushes”? (cue laughter!)
Do you tender precise costings or bravely go with rough guestimates? Do you prioritise KPIs and systems or do you elevate the importance of high-trust and personal relationships backed by experience? No prizes for Mike’s preferred sides of that ledger. Another diagram shown by Mike was titled the Dullness Matrix. This was a jest-filled table where the vertical axis was headed ‘Likelihood of (the project) being enjoyable/ interesting’ and the horizontal axis was headed ‘Risk’.
For more takes on Mike’s working life see these articles:
ABC – Meet Mike Hewson, the artist behind Melbourne's 'risky' playground
Esquire – The sublime structures of Mike Hewson