The footage left viewers around the world in awe of both Hawken's skill and the scenery. While it is legal to skateboard on New Zealand roads, a New Zealand Police spokesperson told the Herald they encourage skateboarders to follow the road rules and ride to the conditions.
We would also encourage users to use safety helmets and gear. By: Heath Moore. Hawken makes brutalist garden sculpture, cast in concrete from the same urethane his wheels are made of, which isn't a coincidence.
He calls his designs "solves" — the same word used in street-skating culture for working out a way to navigate a buttress or a bench.
He's interested in exposing function and letting it force the design — like street skating in reverse. The style emerged, ironically, at the same time "nek minnit" was brewing.
In , Hawken designed and led the painting of a 45m mural in the Leith river tunnel in Dunedin. The artist and poet Hana Aoake wrote that the work "highlights Hawken's active engagement with Modernist conventions and abstraction, as it reflects aspects of German expressionist Franz Marc and a kinetic embodiment of the theories of Kandinsky. The work is innately autonomous and can also be likened to a tomb, with the sharp lines of a hawk acting as a memento mori for both his late grandfather and close friend who died earlier this year.
In this way the lines appear to me to resemble hieroglyphic symbols moving your eye across the wall like an archaeologist studying an ancient inscription. And Aotea Square was gone and to me Auckland was just going through a real weird phase.
I was pissed off about the grey. We also did a big skate event and we built all these ramps and I painted them all grey. Like a protest — but at the same time saying, 'Okay, you want grey? I'll do my art out of grey. When Hawken says "Aotea Square was gone", he means Terry Stringer's iconic sculpture Mountain Fountain, which was removed from its place in the square and later relocated at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell so the roof of the civic carpark could be strengthened.
The work features in the documentary as a nexus of Hawken's passions — both a fixture for teen skaters to "solve" and an inspiration for his art.
The engineers came in and made it a lot more robust than he intended it to be — which actually made it perfect for skateboarding. I still follow his work. And I have met him. We teed up an interview for Manual magazine for an article about Aotea Square, but I was a lot younger and I think was a little bit too bouncy and excitable about his monument.
And he just wasn't very excited. And then we came and skated it and that was a second level of art — because you had to solve it, in how you were going to go skate on it. Then someone could take photos of you solving it and that's the third level of art. Before this, he was landscaping, toiling in and around the gardens of the southern slopes of Herne Bay, where he grew up, before it all gentrified.
They'll bring you a cup of tea and let you use the toilet. New money, they're suspicious and making sure everything's locked. H e doesn't know if he'll make a living as an artist but lifelong motivation surely counts on his side.
Andrew Moore, director of the New Zealand skate documentary No More Heroes, captured the first videos of Hawken in action for his Yeah Bo series in the late s and recalls him as "just totally into it. Every day, I'd see him somewhere skating. He'd enter all the competitions. It was an Edwards. I managed to learn to ollie up a two inch high curb on that piece of shit with a weet bix tail, it was the best feeling ever.
Kinda shaped like a Tony Hawk. I could only afford the narrow grip tape so I had to cut it crazy to make it cover the whole width. So I had a pro deck but still had shitty plastic base Edwards trucks and roller skate wheels. Then I got a set of 97a Slime Balls, gradually upgraded each part till it was proper. Got trackers next and a fluro green Tony Hawk 7 Ply. AHA: Have you always lived in that part or have you moved around a bit?
Levi: I lived in Auckland most of my life. I needed to get away from all the bad shit and find some inspiration. Then I went home and missed the sick natural street terrain in Melbourne. So I kept going back for six months or a year at a time.
I was back and fourth for years. Melbourne became a second home. In 97 I came over and we started filming and getting photos for the mags, There were some videos like Tweakage 1 and 2, Boom Brotherhood. Then I came and back and was raving about it too, everyone got hyped and wanted to skate new shit and also escape from the torrential rain in NZ over winter.
The Boom onslaught was notorious. Chey and Justin are my bros, skating with them always pushed me and kinda made me feel like a sucked, they were the superstars.
Skating with Secombe we would learn so much, push each other to skate bigger hand rails. We started out at a similar level but he got so good, he ended up in my opinion better than anyone in NZ, just skating fast and doing really hard tricks on super high things. I catch up with Chey the most, he still rips too. Secombe passed away. Justin mostly works and surfs. I just always skate and try my hardest and push to get on the teams, always pushing to get sponsored by my favourite brands. But Melbourne had the sickest street skating, smooth stone and marble, plus it rained less than Auckland in winter.
More coverage in magazines and videos, just more people shooting photos and filming, you gotta remember it was all on film and video tape. There were Comps, demos, events, There was always other stuff going on too, parties, clubs, art openings. Every day was a party back then. Free Booze and a lot of girls. So many other crew, so forgive me for not mentioning all the other people shredding back then. Levi: Yeah Frank wanted to do Edwards skateboards again but Andrew Mapstone and Morri talked him into doing a new brand.
Then the Boom team got real big so Morri took his pick of the team and they started Strobe. AHA: Are those companies still going today? Levi: They are actually! The quality was often questionable, with a lot of it coming out of China. They are kind of budget brands now you can only them buy online.
Frank celebrated 44 years in the business the other day. I joked with him saying 44 years in and out of the business, we had a good laugh. I ended up designer and brand manager for Boom for quite a few years until I bounced in It ruined some of the fun of skating for me. Any downhill skater knows how fast you go through jeans shorts in summer. Levi: I was always into art growing up. Skateboarding was always full of art too.
The skaters I worshipped always had grip tape art and skate graphics were epic and often done by skaters. Plus you were usually broke so you would often create your own. Levi: I did art through school up till 7th form, painting and photography. I drew and painted pictures of people hanging and skating at our staple street spot Aotea Square. I was getting really stoked on graffiti characters and that came through in the characters I painted.
Dope sneakers like puma and Adidas. Then after I finished school I kept drawing more graffiti and a about a year later I did my first spray can tag and got obsessed by it. Levi Hawken : I always liked mediums that were free or cheap.
We used to rack spray paint, then when it got too hot I started using roller paint, doing a lot of block colour fill. That went on to using grey anti graffiti paint to do graffiti. AHA: What artwork are you working at the moment? Also a big concrete wall relief at a skatepark.
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