DIY art

Everyday materials are transformed into garden sculptures at the property of Murray Trowern. Sarah Foy visits the Inglewood home he shares with wife Robyn and their three children.

Murray Trowern wouldn't call himself a garden artist. And he's not a pedantic DIY bloke determined to build stuff to prove his manhood or save a few bucks.

He's an in-between chap: creative, chatty and amiable on the one hand, practical, thrifty, clear-thinking on the other.

This mix of function and flair has seen him transform concrete, timber and metal into garden furniture and sculptures. He's also a dab hand with a paintbrush, replicating Picasso paintings on his own canvasses. And along the way he, wife Robyn and their three children, have renovated their 130-year-old cottage and transformed its garden into a casual, kid-friendly property.

One of Murray's most striking outdoor artworks is a three- seater couch that's a permanent fixture beside the front lawn. Multicoloured tiles are set into the seat, armrests and back. There's grey and white through its base and arms, blue and black on the seat and - most striking of all - a mosaic of red, orange, green and white that forms a series of fruit bowl pictures. A dragonfly sitting on one armrest completes the detail.

Murray, a chef who heads up the catering team in the hostel at New Plymouth Boys' High, was inspired by similar furniture he saw in Taupo. He began with a plywood frame, packed in wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of concrete, plastered it, applied adhesive and tiles and then grouted.

The result - six years on - is still pleasing.

"I love it - yeah, I do. Everybody who comes out to visit really loves it. I like the way you sit right back into it."

As for comfort, "it's not bad".

"It's solid but smooth. The pool tiles are great because they're flat and don't stick in your back."

His initial design was more elaborate. A mosaic throw or rug was to have draped across the couch, but the cost of the extra tiles put him off. Its outside location hasn't mattered. The couch looks as clean and bright as the day it was made. Small drainage holes in the seats ensure water doesn't pool and muddy the effect.

Mark II in the mosaic furniture series was an armchair and second couch - this one a slightly smaller two-seater. These two items are at the back of the weatherboard cottage in a "nothing" area behind the lean-to laundry.

Work began on them four years ago.

"I really wanted to do an armchair for some reason, but I needed to do a couch to make it work."

It took several weekends to build them and layer on the concrete. Staff at the Tile Warehouse let him hunt around for redundant tiles in a stockroom; he opted for yellows, greys and apricot. Over four days, he applied the broken bits with help from the family.

"They were untiled for a while and then I had to psyche myself up to do the tiles, because there was more work involved. After I'd finished, I'd had enough [of mosaics]."

The nothing area remains a work in progress. The couch and chair sit sturdily at its centre, but Murray has plans to create a mosaic floor rug and paint a picture on the adjoining laundry wall.

On the adjacent timber deck there's a recent creation: A tiled figure, lean but reminiscent of a female torso. It began life as an idea for an outside candelabra. Someone had given Murray a broken cymbal, figuring he'd reincarnate it in some form. Sure enough, the cymbal was broken in pieces to form a necklace.

"I hunted around to see what other stuff I had. It was only ever going to be a steel frame and then I decided to concrete it and make a shape and then Robyn said we needed to mosaic it.

"I wasn't trying to do anything in particular," he adds when discussion turns to what it resembles.

"I quite like the idea of sculpture, but it doesn't mean replicating something that's living. Things have to have a different twist on them."

Next up he plans to take a small abstract figure of a woman playing a fiddle and make it lifelike.

"I reckon it would be cool. You could build it up here," he says gesturing to the torso, "mosaic it and then, because I like doing steel work, make the fiddle from metal."

Examples of other lifelike work are found in two contrasting pieces around his property. One, a nikau palm, has a rough concrete trunk that conceals its sturdy wooden post. The fronds are fashioned from steel plates commonly used in panel-beating. The juxposition is interesting: They're deadly spiky, yet delicate. Murray is ambivalent about his creation four years on.

"The idea was for it to rust, but now I'm not so sure. I think it looks like the tree has died."

Metres away, there's a wooden carving of a long-haired beauty. The timber has deepened in colour and the woman's gown is streaky concrete. She's a solid yet sensuous creature.

Murray traces his earliest creative urges back to the margarine carvings he did as a young chef. He used to make eagles, swans and mermaids for fancy buffets. As a youngster, he trained as an apprentice at the Westown Hotel, when Lion Breweries owned it. His previous jobs have included positions at the Auto Lodge and the Plymouth hotel. Wife Robyn, also a chef, works down the road at Witt.

Those artistic spells exemplified by the margarine carvings found another outlet when Murray built a house truck before he and Robyn had kids.

"That was kind of creative in that I had never really done building before. Being a chef, at the end of the night, I had nothing to show for my work."

When he and Robyn bought their Inglewood property 13 years ago, his self-taught carpentry skills got another outing. Their cottage needed mountains of work. Over the years, Murray has built everything from kitchen and bedroom cupboards to boardwalks and decking.

The back section below the deck is given over to shrubs and a semi-bush feel. The front section has a lovely expanse of lawn trimmed in hedges.

Across a creek and a paddock, there's a two-storeyed tree hut, complete with attractively pitched roof and corrugated iron planter boxes. For the Trowern kids, the novelty has worn off. Murray shrugs off the snub. There's an old metre-long eel in the creek that gets to gaze up at the hut. And Murray will just go on, fulfilling his creative cravings regardless.

- © Fairfax NZ News