Mike Hewson’s Greatest Feat: ‘The Key is Under the Mat’
Words by Lameah Nayeem | Photography by Derek Henderson
Down, down, down the rabbit hole you go. The spiral descent into the Art Gallery of New South Wale’s Tank will spit you into unknown territory. There are no rules here, where the bottom-most floor of the gallery yawns awake, bleached in a pale, eternal-sunshine from the fluorescent lights above. Strange forces of nature are at work. A hurricane must have lifted those palm trees from faraway streets and placed them here, scattered throughout the exhibition, still wrapped in concrete at their base. There’s no clear path through the space; you may climb or weave around the labyrinthine sculptures in some other way. Mike Hewson’s The Key is Under the Mat may be designed to incite confusion and curiosity — but once those fall away, know it’s time for play.
The artist appears, emerging from a recording studio erected along the far wall, one of the many secret hidey-holes in the expansive, reformed Tank. Hewson gestures at the 2,200 square metre space, the entirety of which has been transformed by a raised floor and multiple social sculptures that render the Tank more a concrete jungle than a former WWII fuel bunker. Near the foot of the spiral staircase is a series of functioning barbecues and sinks. Hewson cites the necessity of using these to construct pastiches of community spaces. He’s been wildly successful in that regard, seeing as upwards of three thousand visitors dwell in the exhibition space daily, hosting small sausage sizzles and picnics.
Yet, a sense of rupture lingers. Children often rearrange the table setups, tossing aside buckets used as makeshift seats. Clothes are in constant circulation at the laundromat setup. The entire space is a strange, delightful exercise in mutability, shifting from one form to another as the public sees fit. There are no security guards to monitor interactions with the sculptures or a diktat determining how to best interact with the sculptures. Hewson taps into an uncanny overlap between the playground and art gallery space, where unmediated and unfiltered interaction with the exhibition dissolves any binary between art and spectator, tradition and decorum.
The exhibition consists of several found objects collected by Hewson over the past several years. “Part of the show is about giving the objects a second life. There’s a piece of granite tucked in the grass, just next to where this was in Melbourne,” Hewson recalls, gesturing to an old column. “It came from the previous building, from when they demolished the tank next door.” He points at another piece of debris, explaining it was the top of a friend’s fence that had broken off when the fence was taken down. “Energetically, these things carry a kind of charge. There are a lot of histories colliding in every corner. Some are personal, some not. But sometimes it’s just sweet, like this little tree growing out of the fence piece. I was given that fence a year before, and then it started sprouting. I’ve kept it growing for the past couple of years, waiting for the right place for it.”
“You need to be exposed to a bit of uncertainty and risk.”
Everything is subject to change and transformation — even the body. Containing blistering heat, Hewson and I venture into the steam room, a small structure repurposed from an old milk storage vat Hewson had spotted on a trip to Fort Ferry. The inside is cramped and the ceiling hangs low. Visitors above 18 can don a pair of fuschia shorts from the laundromat, also designed by Hewson, to relax inside. Alternatively, you can step into the sauna-slash-construction-shed hybrid. When Hewson and I sit inside, it’s startling how little noise from the outside bleeds in. A handful of church pews fill the timber office, backdropped by stained glass windows. Amidst the peace, Hewson recalls memories from his engineering days: “I spent a lot of time in these small offices, so I thought it would be an interesting object to work with. I found an old shed, and we built the interiors to match its original design. We also built these pews.” These miniature sites act as metonymy for the exhibition where sculpture meets space, meets improvisation, meets kids pressing their noses up against things. Everything becomes an opportunity for art. “When you’re in this context of being cooled, or warmed up, or seated, or steamed, you’re changing between bodily experiences. The floor’s uneven, too. There are so many different shapes and surfaces; you can climb, hang, maybe even scratch yourself on the smooth bits. You need to be exposed to a bit of uncertainty and risk.”
“There’s a kind of profound beauty in ordinary things, especially when they settle into these familiar, almost comforting compositions.”
Danger and play, as we know, often come intertwined. "It’s about embodiment: being physically present, engaging with materials that are usually overlooked. Bricks, bits of concrete, these are banal, everyday objects, even rubbish at times, but here, they become something else.” Hewson borrows the term ‘sublime’ to describe this aspect of the exhibition. The sublime, as opined by Kant, is a perceptual experience of beauty pursued for its own sake. It evokes an awareness of our mortality — when confronted with unfathomable beauty, we fear that we exist at the abject mercy of forces we cannot comprehend. How to deal with it? With play, of course. Artists can produce music inside the recording booth, which remains closed to the public. They can also apply for a residency inside the Hobbit-house perched in the corner of the Tank. Creation is encouraged, whether through an established medium or interaction with the exhibition itself. Each sensation, from the prickling of your skin inside the steam room to a scraped knee while climbing, is the processing of feeling into fact. “There’s a kind of profound beauty in ordinary things, especially when they settle into these familiar, almost comforting compositions. You look at something and think, I’ve seen that concrete before, maybe by the beach, or somewhere in Europe, where someone’s done a patch job. It’s familiar, almost recognisable in its imperfection.” While the sublime is traditionally experienced through art, it is also symptomatic of natural disasters. Hewson’s shares how his experience of the Christchurch earthquakes shapes his approach to art: “That shock to the system, the reminder that things inevitably shift, change shape, collapse, or rebuild, it stays with you.”
As we near the end of the interview, Hewson and I return to the entrance. We glance around at the Tank’s vastness. Everything I am familiar with now will be a stranger tomorrow. The space has already started to shed its skin: Hewson had spotted a broken pew inside the sauna and will have it fixed, the tabletops will be wiped clean of today’s grime, and the laundromat will regurgitate a new set of clothes. To close, one of Hewson’s final remarks to me: “There’s a beauty in that simplicity and temporality. It’s what draws me to objects that are precarious, where there’s entropy and decay, which, in turn, show us our own impermanence. An old piece of concrete, for instance, has already lived one life and begun another, but it still carries that entropy within it. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.”