It is not often that you hear people’s enjoyment of art – audible squeals and shrieks echoing through the hallowed halls of arts galleries but Aotearoa New Zealand-born, Sydney-based sculptor Mike Hewson changes that.
In his first museum show, Hewson throws convention out the door, turning the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank space into a living playground. Think monkey bars, barbecues and bathers.
Mike Hewson at AGNSW – quick links
Long before you enter the space you can hear it buzzing with activity – the sound of pure joy. Next, you are welcomed by a sign that encourages food, drink and picnicking, all traditional gallery taboos.
Indeed, this entire installation is one chaotic, wet free-for-all. It was a brave move by the gallery to take on an ex-engineer-come-artist who champions risk as a cornerstone of his practice, and to hand over its summer blockbuster spot.
What’s in the space?
Hewson’s installation The Key’s Under the Mat is brightly lit thanks to 60 repurposed plastic pallet tanks, which hover overhead and flood the space with artificial daylight. It’s in sharp contrast to our expectations after earlier exhibitions in the subterranean Tank used moody, low lighting and riffed off the Tank’s dramatic architecture, such as Adrián Villar Rojas’ The End of Imagination (2022), Louise Bougeois (2023-24), Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When (2024) and The Mulka Project’s Yalu (2025).
Hewson was having none of that. What I loved as a viewer in this space was seeing people enjoying this art experience as a normalised everyday activity.
This thread of the unexpected continues on every level, but most adeptly through Hewson’s material vernacular. The key word here is converted – all objects in this exhibition have had a prior life. In one part of the installation, a dairy industry milk vat has been turned into a steam room, complete with travertine marble and a stained-glass skylight. It was found in a junkyard in Port Fairy, Victoria.
Just a few meters away, a converted 1980s ATCO site shed is home to a sauna-come-chapel. Yep, the religion is pleasure here.
The sauna is an all-sensory experience. The hot air settles on your skin and the smell of cedar fills the air in direct contrast to the dank smell of wet concrete in the Tank outside, formerly an oil container. The muffled laughter of children still reaches you.
Moving back into the fray, kids fly on swings, clamber over monkey bars and splash under a shower-come-waterfall cobbled together from reclaimed concrete and buckets. Palm trees pepper the space, bagged up and held on angles with industrial ratchet straps.
Those who have visited Wollongong on the south coast of New South Wales will know Hewson’s mall intervention (the palms are a bit of a signature for Hewson) and bringing them inside is a nice touch here.
At the heart of the space is a pumping, makeshift laundromat. Dryers spin in action, held aloft by a Hills Hoist washing line, in a clever pun. It’s here you can pick up some slippers, shorts and a t-shirt and head to the change room with your 1970s towel ahead of your sauna, or you can literally do you washing if you are a savvy time manager.
I visited during the first week of school holidays at lunchtime and the barbies were cranking. A steel road plate has been converted into hotplates and an exhaust fan – made from a repurposed grain bin – vents just enough of the aromas away yet still leaves you salivating.
Hewson has also included a recording studio, the Green sound box, which will be used by the music community during the exhibition period as well as an artist-in-residence ‘hovel’ for short-term periods.
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Scattered across the space, fragments of urban architecture blend with the Tank’s columns. A broken cement sink sits atop a purple bucket and a grey recycling bin, while clusters of cement and granite are ratcheted together. Hewson knows first-hand the power of materials, having lived through the 2011 Ōtautahi Christchurch earthquakes when he lost his home and studio.
He describes the experience as a catalyst to his making today and a critical part of his mission as an artist – to see opportunities in material use, to celebrate their histories and to shape futures that are more adaptable, resilient and less stuck on notions of grandeur.
The entire space is presented on a raised floor concealing plumbing. Recycled timber floorboards are paired with mosaic offcuts that are abstractions in their own right. Hewson calls these mosaics ‘Piet’ paving and they could be paintings if hung on a wall. Remnants come indiscriminately from the construction of the Opera Bar at Sydney Opera House through to the Corrimal Coke Works.
Simply, I like the honesty of this project.
Mike Hewson: do we care?
This is a gallery? Is this art? Do we care? Not really.
People are engaged and loving this experience. This is 2,220 square metres of simple fun. For too long galleries have been hitching their train to the jargon of immersive and experiential art making, often delivering little beyond the media release. Hewson blatantly pushes against our perceptions of what an art gallery can be, using all the taboos – water, food, running inside – to create new looking.
To be honest, most of the people in the space on the day I visited would not be thinking, ‘I’m having an art experience’. But it is this very embeddedness that is so critically needed in Australia to elevated the value of culture in our lives.
Today, playgrounds have become so risk adverse, as have galleries. With his grunge attitude and engineer’s brain (his past profession), Hewson crafts an environment that tests our ease with uncertainty and perceptions of gallery behaviour.
I am told the attendance, since opening last week, has broken all records for the space. Hewson’s title for this exhibition then, has even greater gravitas as it moves beyond a conceptual project to an audience-owned experience. The key’s under the mat. Let yourself in and make yourself at home.
