Jerry Howlett can remember sitting cross-legged on the school mat listening to and watching artists talk about their work.
But it was getting hands-on that really excited him, and he can still remember making things like masks, drums and puppets with the artists as part of the West Harbour Charitable Trust artist residency.
"It was the highlight of the year for me."
So when the trust offered him the opportunity to do the same for the next generation of students he could not resist.
Sitting down in front of a class recently he could remember the time where he was one of those students.
"It’s quite funny now being on the other side of it. It is nice to be able to give back in that kind of way."
Having grown up with a mum who is a potter, making things at home was second nature, but he really enjoyed the opportunity to try his hand at something new every year at school.
Over the years, Howlett’s art practice has evolved into making alternate worlds as a commentary on the state of the environment and nature.
While he loves to go large, as per his master of arts project "ReWorlding" where he created a series of figurative sculptures of Earthforms, large walking creatures which were giant landscapes, Howlett most often creates small box-works which feature the surreal and playful that he likes to call his "little worlds".
It is these small worlds he hopes will capture the attention of the primary school and early childhood children taking part in the project.
He also wanted to draw on his master’s project theme around reimagining the world in response to the way humans plunder the Earth as a resource without consideration for the wider implication of their actions and the damage.
"It is those environmental messages and using storytelling to bring those messages to light. It's the interconnection between ourselves and the natural world out there.
"Looking at ways that we interact with it, and it interacts with us and the connectedness."
The students were asked to select an endangered animal to "look after" and during the residency, create a mask so they can "become" the animal and also create miniature habitat for the species in which they could survive in a jam jar.
To inspire the students, Howlett read them a story — amended to make it more child-friendly — by American author and philosopher Donna Haraway, a theorists who was quite important in his master’s work and someone whose work he wanted to further explore.
"I looked at how these communities of the future kind of decided to move to ruined places to heal them and that their children were then paired up with the endangered species to then nurture throughout their life.
"They would learn about their species and then the species would teach them things and they would sort of create this shared relationship of care to look after one another. Maybe the species would die out if they were unlucky and then they would then have to become the speaker of the dead to carry on the stories."
The treatment of animals has always played a part in his works.
He created 50 black birds, then feasted on an over-sized giant.
Howlett took some time off after finishing his honours year, before heading back to DSA in 2021 to do his master’s degree, which he completed earlier this year.
In that time he created Earthforms, which inhabited the creating environments where human and non-human can learn to reconnect.
"It's just been a lot of playing with scale, trying to push in either direction, big or small, and there's only so much you can kind of do [with] big stuff with limited space and that kind of thing."
So that led him to the other extreme — miniature works.
"It's been quite fun playing around with the classic railway model kind of techniques and whatever, and turning them into something a little bit less hobby-like."
He experimented with those techniques, "turning them on their head".
"Trying to make as much of the material as I can to kind of keep that sustainability kind of side of things using sawdust and mattress foam and blending them up.
"Trial and error, see what works, what doesn't."
"You can kind of see a development over the years as they go from these very blocky-looking things to now hopefully [looking] a bit more realistic. Because they're kind of hard things to get right on a small scale."
It is work that requires a steady hand and good eyesight but Howlett admits when he tried making people out of match sticks it was a step too far.
"I kind of decided that was a bit too small and have gone for a 1:60 scale.
"I think it’s quite nice, not too difficult but small enough to be a challenge."
If he has the concept for a work in his mind it can take a couple of days to make but if he has a more complex idea, it can take a couple of weeks to make — for example, making the individual tentacles for a giant sea monster.
"Some things involve a bit more sculpting of different elements and the painting and drawing."
His work is often inspired by the books he reads or the movies he watches but it can also be quite intuitive.
"I like to take an element and run with it. Or it might be something like a paper boat and then using it in some way to create a story."
Howlett has also been experimenting with 3D printing using plant-based resins and hopes to improve his skills in digital sculpting, especially for the tiny figures he finds difficult to sculpt himself .
That doesn’t mean he wants all his work to be 3D printed.
"I still want my hand in it. So it's just parts that I 0may not necessarily be able to do myself or if I want more detail or if I don't have time."
Now his master’s is over he is also taking some time out to investigate nature from a different aspect — gardening.
He has been studying organic primary production — an idea that appealed to him after a friend did a similar course.
"I just looked up to see what it was like and thought, I might give that a go.
"It's kind of a nice extension, I guess, of some of the ideas that I had been working on with my art but in a more real world connection. [It’s] a nice area to go down."
He sees it as a pretty similar process to his art and has the family property at Deborah Bay to work on.
"You're working naturally but you're actually just growing something else instead instead of making a piece of art."
TO SEE
Jerry Howlett’s art residency with Port Chalmers and Pūrākaunui schools and ECEs which started on Monday will culminate in an exhibition/event on Sunday.
