Here is the full transcript of visual artist Mike Hewson’s talk titled “Playing With Risk: The Dangers of Thinking Safe” at TEDxSydney 2022 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Childhood Adventures and Dam Building
One winter, when I was about seven, my friends and I decided that we would build a dam out the back of our school. Now, there was this grassy creek that wound through a farm paddock and it narrowed between two banks, which is where we dug up dirt and piled it in the centre. It took quite a few lunch times that eventually we started to flood the paddock and then eventually the neighbour’s property next door.
And then we took it even further and we built a raft, and I have no idea how we managed to build a raft, but we would pile dirt on it and then we would drag it across, stack it up, make the dam higher.
When the lake froze over (we were calling it a lake at this point), Thomas would jump in and he would wade through, breaking the ice with his belly with us sitting on the raft, which is obviously fantastic, right? You know, unsupervised seven-year-olds in cold, wet clothing in the middle of the winter building a shoddy mud dam. Maybe a little irresponsible. So, does anyone have a fond memory of a wild childhood adventure that they have?
Artistic Beginnings
Yeah, I mean, they’re like very vivid memories for us. This is a drawing I did around the same age. I was clearly a sort of odd creative kid, but strangely practical. I liked how things were put together and I was interested in that.
And now I make artwork in public places, large, permanent, usually climbable things, in unsupervised places filled with children, parents, teenagers, where anything could go wrong. When I’m dreaming up these projects, it’s really hard not to get bogged down in all the things you can’t do, because it’s not safe, it’s too risky, maybe what if this happens? All these risk-reducing, practical concerns that seem to crush creativity.
Introduction to Mike’s Artistic Journey
So, my name’s Mike. I’m here today to just share some of the experiences that have led me to become the artist that I am today. I’ll take you through some of the projects that I’ve made and a lot of the learnings that I’ve had, often from observing the adventurous child when it comes to things around embracing the inherent risks in life.
And I hope to leave you with a sense of why it’s really important that we encourage exploratory and risk-taking behaviour in an everyday public setting.
Engineering to Art: A Career Transition
So, my dream was always to be an artist, but it didn’t start out that way. Out of school, I studied civil engineering and my first job was in marine construction, building a pipeline just off the coast of New Zealand. So, the ocean is a wild, dangerous, unpredictable place where you quickly learn to expect the unexpected. There’s no shop around the corner, so you have to be resourceful.
And when things go wrong, and often they go horribly wrong, you have to be able to think on your feet to come up with solutions. There’s no off-the-shelf solution, so you have to be stuck with your own creativity. Which is why engineering is great. It’s logical, it’s clear, it’s problem-solving, it’s methodical, it’s risk-averse. But my other love, art, seems always to be kind of the exact opposite.
Hard to combine the two. Which is why every couple of years I would quit my engineering job because something was missing. There was this constant pull away from uncertainty, trying to escape risk. But it turns out you can’t escape danger.
The Christchurch Earthquake: A Turning Point
And in February 2011, Christchurch, the city where I lived, was shaken to the ground in a giant earthquake. And the city where I had an art studio at the time was locked up from the public for almost two years. Overnight, the city became sort of an unrecognisable wasteland. All of the landmarks that we knew were removed, and even precious heritage buildings weren’t spared either.
So I would sneak back into the inner city and paste up images on buildings. It was my way of temporarily trying to put some love back into the inner city. These projects didn’t last for long because as we were building them, the buildings were being knocked down. So, you know, I had to don hivers because you couldn’t get access and just jump over the fences.
And I often used my sort of engineering credentials to talk my way in. Things were changing very quickly, but in hindsight, this time of massive and rapid change kind of gave me also a sense of strange possibility. It kind of started to temporarily open things up. So that period where the stable city that I knew, it became like the wild ocean.
A New Perspective on Temporariness
It was suddenly dangerous, unpredictable, and you had to think on your feet. And the sense that everything was really temporary, it never really left me. And so when I was invited to propose a project in the city of Wollongong, I wanted to kind of bring this sense of like, you know, things are temporary.
The Wollongong Project
I want it to be light, I want it to be vulnerable. I want something that can grow alongside the city and the people there, something of like local significance. And, you know, when I visited the newly designed city square, this fantastic low-budget Christmas tree is not mine, I wish it was. But it was missing something. It had no connection to the landscape.
So this was my realized proposal, which was effectively like a living flagpole.
And the most prominent part was this 100-year-old palm tree strapped to the top of a lamppost. It was part of a series of sculptures that were strewn down the mall. And then there was these palm tree seats, which are laid on their side, appearing unplanted.
Sandstone Sculptures and Forklift Slots
I also did these sandstone boulders with these slightly silly forklift slots cut in them, as if a rock-for-hire company had dropped them off. And then Troy, this amazing stone guru, carved these huge sandstone formations that we went through the onerous process of eventually getting them down to the mall, which was no small feat.
And then, as you do, we thought it would be great to core a little hole through one of the formations and poke a little palm tree through, and we decided to leave it there. And if you go down to Wollongong, it’s doing very well four years on.
An Impromptu Playground
We did a rubber matting that matched the granite paving in the mall, and then whacked on a swing, and you have an elegantly thrown-together playground. And this artwork had the kind of unusual requirement that it needed to do something, and it wasn’t what the public were expecting. A lot of people said it’s not safe, it’s too risky. Maybe it’s fine in nature, but not in the central city.
Children’s Understanding and Acceptance
But the kids, they got it. They instantly understood it, and they swarmed it, and they helped translate to the adults what the thing was. They didn’t need to see the hidden engineering that was keeping the palm trees alive. They got it.
So I took a big risk on this project. I copped a lot of flack. But in the end, I was trying to open up, like, what’s possible? What can we do?
The Importance of Risk-Taking
Let’s do something new. And in the end, it was embraced, which is why it’s important to be prepared to take risks. And if we’re observant, we can take cues from the risks that we’re drawn to, because it’s like we want to teach ourselves something. In my work with playgrounds, I am keenly interested in observing how kids want to interact with things.
For example, kids like climbing things. They’re always annoyingly trying to climb things. If you’re trying to walk down the street, they’re always scrambling up a tree, or, like, walking along a wall. To them, like, everything is potentially a playground, and you can’t really stop them.
The St. Peter’s Project
So hold that thought. I was invited to submit a proposal down the road in St. Peter’s, where many homes were being taken by the government and demolished to make way for a big highway tunnel project, and Sydney people know what I’m talking about. A very disjointing and very difficult time for that community.
Rebuilding Fences from Demolished Houses
So I ended up studying archive images of old homes and proposed to rebuild their front fences in a park from the bricks of the houses that had been demolished. And so here’s a layout of all the different fences that we built. But I decided to work with a local school to come up with a layout for this. And as you would expect, it ended up being, like, haphazardly plonked all over the place.
A real mash-up, which is one of my favourite looks. And here’s some photos of us, like, meticulously working through to try and, like, basically construct these fences. And, you know, we wanted them to be kind of, like, almost sinking into the ground like a graveyard, but it’s quite complicated engineering to sort of arrest them in this position for the next, you know, 50 years or however long. So here’s the graveyard.
But, you know, but for kids, this is like a wild, unkempt ruin, and it’s great. And for them, it confirms that they’re supposed to explore real risks. Because in the end, it’s how they learn to keep themselves safe. And, you know, kids aren’t stupid.
Children’s Risk Assessment
They don’t necessarily assume things are safe all the time. And it’s quite interesting if there’s, like, a loose object or something that looks like it’s not connected in, I notice that they’ll often just, like, give it a little nudge before they’ll try and, like, yank on it and see if they can walk on something. And, you know, they’re running all these little risk assessments all the time to see how they should navigate the world. And these kinds of spaces, like, facilitate that for them.
And I think we’re all kind of intrigued by ruins because it’s something that, like, we want to know about precarity. We want to know about interminence for some reason. We want it near us. And, you know, we somehow, there’s something appealing about we don’t just want straight lines and clean surfaces.
So as an engineer, I’m getting pretty great at jumping through hoops. I’m getting great at, like, navigating through all the regulations to try and, like, open things up to try and create more possibility. And I think it’s really important that we do that because when people come up to me and they see these projects, they’re like, how did you get away with it? Like, who said yes?
Challenging Assumptions of Safety
It’s like I’ve broken some secret rule. And I think it touches on this assumption that we have in the 21st century that everything should be on one track. It should be more safe. That’s the direction we’re going.
It’s the only gospel. We’ve got to be ordered. We’ve got to be predictable. It’s got to be efficient. It’s got to be, you know, it’s got to be probably more boring. And so they’re genuinely surprised when we kind of get to these projects. But, you know, we know that’s not the reality of the world we live in. So, like, why do we try and, like, live as if it’s always going to be good?
And I think, you know, how do we, in modern cities, ensure that kids can have adventures so they can be prepared in life? And I think how do we prepare ourselves so we don’t get thrown up on the high seas, you know? We all know the last couple of years, what it’s been like. It happens and it’s going to continue to happen.
And, you know, we need to be ready. And so I got this other opportunity in a recent project to propose something much more freeform. Like, kids love stacking things and, you know, I like stacking things too. You sort of find whatever’s lying around and put it up into a tower.
The Seven-Year-Old Dam Builder’s Spirit
And so this was like me, I’m the seven-year-old dam builder, piling up towers of rubbish, heavy-duty plastic buckets. It was really a leftovers project. And, you know, I even used old trees that they were cutting down in the park at the time and incorporated them. And, yeah, I was just trying to, like, have a bit of fun with it.
Engineering Complexity in Artistic Projects
And then in the end, it’s quite complicated engineering to pull these off because I’m trying to design, like, the wild ocean, but I don’t sort of want to try and build it like a six-billion-dollar submarine or something. You know, like, it’s got to do both. I think the way the kids interact with this is that they get it and they move around it because there’s nothing prescribed in the way they know how to interact with these things. And what I find really encouraging about these parks is that they’re effectively an endorsement from the government that kids need, you know, that risk is valuable and that we see that kids are capable of navigating the big, bad world on their own and with their friends when they’re older.
Pushing Limits and Risk Management
This is a project I’m doing with the City of Melbourne, photoed from this week, that I push, and I push limits because we need some people to push in the opposite direction of safe thinking so we don’t develop blind spots, and this goes in every area. But I take risk management very seriously, and I’m not just saying that in case my insurer is watching this TED video. I take it seriously because there’s nothing endearing or useful about negligence or recklessness. Risk management 100% helps me deliver these projects.
Balancing Safety and Risk
It’s very helpful. We absolutely need to be improving the way we, like, look after the vulnerable and the diverse needs of the community. However, what I want to say is we’ve also got to think about what we’re losing and potentially, you know, blindly focus on reducing risk. We can’t put handrails around everything, and even if we could, I don’t think it would really benefit us.
Embracing Life and Risk
So I’m going to go back to the start. You know, embracing risk is really just part of embracing life. And thinking about those, like, cute little, like, seven-year-olds trying to build their little, like, lunchtime dam in the middle of winter, like, should we let them do it? It’s really up to you guys, but, you know, come on.
