Work and play

It's another morning in the cavernous Tank beneath the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The scene feels less like a museum and more like a delirious village square. A tribe of children cluster around a birthday cake, their shrieks bouncing off the concrete. A toddler in an oversized T-shirt repeatedly slaps a button that drenches him in water. A couple sit in a dim sauna, eyes closed, the heat curling around them. Nearby, an older man in sagging underwear empties a bucket of chilled water over his head. Sandy towels and bathers from a morning’s ocean swim spin around in dryers.

People aren’t just visiting Mike Hewson’s installation The Key’s Under the Mat. They are living in it – inhabiting it with the casual ease reserved for a favourite park or playground. Hewson watches all of this with delight. ‘People are authentically living,’ he says. ‘It feels like that [Pieter Bruegel the Elder] painting of the village square – people in a shared space, living harmoniously but without much attention paid to anyone else around them. It feels genuine.’

This radical sense of permission is at the heart of Hewson’s practice, and never more so than in the Tank. What he has created is part sculpture, part playground, part construction site, part public bathhouse, part party venue – an anarchic commons where art becomes experience.