Mike Hewson is an Aotearoa-born artist and civil engineer whose practice spans sculpture, public infrastructure and, more recently, furniture. His work often intervenes in built environments, reconsidering how people move through and understand shared civic space.
Much of what Hewson makes is built from salvaged material other people had already given up on, including a stack of Sydney Opera House concrete that spent forty years forgotten in a lavender field. That same concrete runs through his first furniture exhibition at Gallery Twenty Twenty and his installation for Sydney Contemporary.
Is creativity something that runs in your family, or did you find it on your own?
My grandmother was an artist. She ran a gallery in Christchurch in the late ’60s called Civil Arts, and spent more of her energy supporting other artists than doing her own work, much to my dad’s frustration at the time. My dad’s got nothing to do with contemporary art, but I recently saw some of the small, improvised renovations he’s done on this little country shack of his, and I thought, oh, that’s where my sculpture comes from. It’s funny, there’s a real cheeky invention in what he does.
You started working with sculpture after moving to New York, and it was there that you found yourself as an artist. Was that a product of the city itself—its density, its intensity—or of the people you found there?
I think it was mostly the people. I didn’t notice much change in myself while I was actually there, but I came back after two years and I was suddenly making sculpture, and stronger work, with a much more defined visual language. Before that, things were more reflective of the site, more camouflaged.
Mike Hewson and Roslyn Oxley of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Mike Hewson’s Piet Pavers on show at Sydney Contemporary 2026
In your first furniture exhibition at Gallery Twenty Twenty, you worked with concrete panels salvaged from the Sydney Opera House forecourt, left forgotten for forty years in a lavender field. How did you approach a material with that much history behind it?
The materials don’t tell you what they want to be straight away, you just have to wait. I’ve built that into my process now, get the materials, live with them for a while, and eventually it becomes obvious. With these, it came down to the simplest possible move: some of the offcuts became legs. Once they became a table, they had so much presence that everything else in the room had to work around them. Even the benches, made from casting sprues I found in a scrap pile, waste that would normally be melted down and remade, had this amazing form straight off the cast. The feet are solid bronze, referencing the bronze that was already in the panels.
The show had a strange, dual feeling to it, ancient and almost sci-fi at once. What were you drawing on there?
There was a lot of interesting thinking around utopian ideals at the time the panels were made, the modernist design movement, so it had a very particular aesthetic. Sixty years on, looking back, people seem much more interested in exploring the mind than in going into space, so in some ways we’re back in the late ’60s, but it’s also a little apocalyptic. The table felt like it could be in the British Museum, as an ancient artifact, but also something out of Dune.
At Sydney Contemporary, everyone fell in love with your Piet pavers. Could architects and designers specify these in their own projects?
Piet pavers are flecked with wood, gold and precious stones that fit together like a puzzle in the French paving pattern. They can be artworks or floor pavers, indoors and outdoors, each one bespoke and unique. The flooring is an extension of something we developed for the Tanks entrance, a modular paving system, basically floor paintings you can actually stand on. They could be built permanently into a house.
What’s next?
It’s amazing just to be making good sculpture, honestly. I work with a bunch of artists and we’re constantly debating what’s good and what needs to be cut, and that’s a real joy, even with all the stress and desperation trying to stay afloat. I want to keep pushing the language, keep offering more.
The Opera House Table showed at Gallery Twenty Twenty until 8 September 2026. Hewson’s installation ran for the duration of Sydney Contemporary, 3–6 September 2026, ahead of a solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery opening in February 2027.
Mike Hewson’s Sydney Opera House tables on show at Gallery Twenty Twenty