Sydney artist Mike Hewson wants people to touch his work
You’re meant to engage with Mike Hewson’s ‘adult playgrounds’ and conceptual artworks. Including at Sydney’s beleaguered fish markets.
Within 10 minutes of speaking to Mike Hewson over the phone, you’ll be invited to visit his studio to witness his work for yourself.
“It makes a lot more sense when you see it,” he says, pulling up outside my office a few minutes later in a Toyota HiLux full of materials from his studio, including scribbles of designs and keepsakes for ideas that will come to fruition later.
It’s not because he lacks the words or has an aversion to detailing his vision. Rather, it’s that the engineer-turned-conceptual-artist’s work defies all conventions of what we understand about design.
We’re greeted by the calming bristle of palm trees outside the front of his studio in Sydney’s Alexandria. “They’re rescues,” he explains of the trees that are a focal point of Hewson’s latest interactive installation, Coal Loader Palm Grove, at Sydney’s revitalised (and beleaguered) $836-million new fish market.
Hewson admires the palms’ tranquillity for a moment, before guiding WISH into the studio. Its transformative atmosphere hits at once: meticulous engineering meets creative explosion, an abundance of recycled materials, looming structures splintered among delicate designs and the paint of projects past and present scattered across the floors.
A score of drills and saws echoes across the warehouse as Hewson’s team operates hoists, pours concrete, and dismantles structures.
“Is that the right height?” the artist calls out to one of his co-workers, currently raised four metres in the air. A sly smile with a subtle shrug is the response. It’s the hallmark confidence of a crew comfortable with not having all the answers yet knowing exactly what they’re doing.
The New Zealand-born Hewson has carved out a singular space in the art world. His dual interests in engineering and creativity form the foundations of his work, a pointed blend of structural limitations meets expansive ideas, challenging conventional notions of safety, play and public space.
The man who spent stints in the mines of Western Australia and across marine construction fields has exhibited work in Moscow, Christchurch and New York City, as well as landing five major permanent commissions in Australia.
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With training from New York’s Columbia University, Hewson wields his technical knowledge like a Trojan horse – a rebellious mechanism of submitting ambitious, even absurdist proposals to civic government bodies, reinforcing them with airtight engineering logic that makes the impractical suddenly viable.
“I’m basically trying to justify my spending of money,” he says, smiling.
Hewson’s art aims to transform how we interact with museum spaces and is attuned to his broader mission of examining how we relate to public infrastructure.
He crafts interactive art spaces that explore and advocate the taking of risks, and he smiles at the suggestion that he may well be an art gallery’s worst nightmare.
“I just don’t want to be shushing anyone who comes to my show,” he insists. “If a work is climbable or tangible, the surface should draw you in. That’s the whole idea ...
“My shows are meant to let someone in and know I’m not there to police the way they want to interact with a space,” he adds.
This ethos comes to life in his ambitious upcoming solo installation, The Key’s Under the Mat, opening in October at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Hewson takes over the Nelson Packer Tank, a 2000-square-metre underground former World War II fuel bunker that will be transformed into a sculptural neighbourhood built from salvaged materials including tiling, studio remnants, and repurposed plinths.
Inside his studio, the team is already simulating pieces of the final installation. In one corner, we speak inside a heated structure reminiscent of a Soviet-era cartoon submarine. Nearby, plans of a sculpture designed from industrial-grade machinery are unfolding. Craftsmen work to re-skin the façade, with travertine details so accurate they even replicate the original scratches and dings. Elsewhere, a painter splashes warm earth tones onto geotextile fabric. “It’s really untethered,” Hewson says.
“The whole show asks, ‘How can we be more hospitable?’. I don’t think public spaces ask that question enough ... It’s part adult wonderland, part experimental common.”
“It’s not just a playground this time,” Hewson says.
“There are places for music, for other artists, for performance – it’s about offering people room to explore.”
The conceptual artist’s philosophy of design hinges on hospitality, boasting works centred around reclaiming space both physically and ideologically. In Wollongong, he suspended palm trees above a mall to create a surreal floating canopy. In Sydney’s Inner West, he crafted a sunken playground from fences salvaged from demolished homes. St Peters Fences feels like discovering the ruins of a lost city – whimsical and haunting, playful and profound. In nearby Leichhardt, his Pockets Park follows the thread: small-scale interventions with expansive social reach.
His $2.5 million Rocks on Wheels in Melbourne’s Southbank – 300 tonnes of bluestone boulders sourced from the same Victorian quarry used to pave Melbourne streets and then perched on furniture dollies – earned him a trifecta of national and international awards. It also triggered public ire. A Current Affair chased him down for using $110,000 of funding on a giant rolling-rock playground, only to see viewers later defend the project.
Controversy, it seems, is built into Hewson’s work. “If it looks like a sculpture, it’s art. If it’s useful, it’s less critiqued. But when it’s both, it becomes a bit political,” he shrugs. “Imagine if the everyone knew how much we spend on roundabouts.”
Hewson sees civic utility as a creative constraint. “Painters are limited by the size of their canvas. I’m limited by height restrictions and fall impact zones,” he explains, pointing out how every surface in his works is engineered to meet strict child-safety standards.
“We design to the standard, and because we understand the standard, we can subvert it,” he says.
Hewson’s distinctive form of urban archaeology, infused with an artist’s curiosity and an engineer’s technical knowledge, successfully pushes the rigid boundaries of public displays.
“Building playgrounds or engaging structures typically means less scrutiny because they are designed to be useful and be used. The things I make just also happen to be artworks,” he says.
Back at the studio, Hewson is juggling timelines. The commercial project at the fish market was initially delayed and the ambitious AGNSW show looms. But if he’s phased, it doesn’t show. “More time in the kitchen,” he muses. “Sometimes that’s worse.”
Hewson is rebuilding the gallery’s subterranean space into a sculptural neighbourhood. He’s evolved past the confines of his previous playgrounds, elevating his craft more than ever.
“Playground has the idea that it’s exclusively for children – I take a bit more of an intergenerational view of its use. If it’s good for kids, it should also be good for adults because inevitably they’re looking after them. Why not think about what interests all generations under the guise of play and exploration, and include all of those things?”
As public space becomes increasingly contested and commodified, artists such as Hewson are redefining what it means to share it. His work doesn’t just transform physical environments, it invites us to reconsider the things we take for granted.
It’s an idea he naturally laughs at, claiming with a hint of sarcasm, “no artist really wants to discuss their purpose”.
“That’s why this work is called Key’s Under the Mat – it’s there for you to discover yourself,” he says.
Hewson is reclaiming the public realm, not just as a backdrop for life, but as a living, evolving artwork. And we’re all invited to enter.
This story is from the June issue of WISH.
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