PLASTIC HEAVEN
Lego takes over at Te Manawa
There’s something about Lego. Put the brightly coloured bricks in front of someone and the natural inclination is to pick them up and put them together. It’s like some primeval cog in our brain clunks into gear, and we begin to build.
Pop your head into the Brick Flicks exhibition at Te Manawa and it’s busy and buzzing with kids everywhere. It’s Lego heaven with creation stations, photographs, movie clips, mini figures, Lego models, giant bricks and a stopmotion video table. It is brim-full with Lego and a certain air of slightly manic excitement.
And then you notice the grownups. They have a ‘‘pretending to be there because of the kids’’ look about them and are rifling through the Lego buckets to find just the right piece for their little creation.
There is also a great satisfaction for parents, because they don’t have to tidy up the floor, unlike at home. Here there are volunteers, like Lego fairies, who do that.
Brick Flicks is proving to be one of Te Manawa’s most popular exhibitions to date, and it started life as a series of photographs taken by Warren Elsmore.
The Lego fanatic recreated iconic movie scenes using Lego and minifigs and those scenes are the backdrop for the exhibition. The world created around those has been driven by Te Manawa’s exhibition designer Rohan Kidd and hasn’t been sponsored or endorsed at all by Lego.
Kidd’s life for about six months prior to the exhibition opening has been immersed in Lego. In fact, the whole of Te Manawa has been pretty absorbed. There is Lego everywhere at their work stations, in colour-co-ordinated piles and with stray bits under a desk. Kidd says that the natural, interactive nature of Lego is the base of the exhibition.
‘‘We have some really cool creation stations where you can just go mad and build whatever you want. It has been a really fun exhibition to work on; it’s all a bit crazy and colourful, with intense Lego colours. Six months was not long to take it from concept to what it is now and at times I did feel like I was drowning in Lego.’’
It’s something that Glenn Knight, the Palmerston North liaison for the Wellington Lego Users Group has possibly dreamt of. He loves Lego, has a whole room dedicated to it and has been a key helper in putting the exhibition together.
Knight heads a group of Lego enthusiasts and got into seriously making his own creations about two years ago. He says there is just something quite magical about rediscovering Lego as an adult.
‘‘I was a kid with Lego and I really loved it. Then I went through what we call the dark ages, when I grew up and lost interest in Lego.’’
He dipped his hand back into the Lego bucket when he was hanging out with his friend’s son and it ‘‘brought back all this nostalgia’’.
He went out and bought a couple of sets and ‘‘it all went downhill from there’’.
Being a Star Wars fan, those were the kits he started with and then after attending a Lego users group show, he realised what he really wanted to be doing was throwing away the instruction booklet and making his own creations.
‘‘I like the process of coming up with ideas and turning it into something physical. There are limitations and you have to think outside of the square a lot.’’
Knight’s Lego room is his happy place, where everything is sorted into storage containers with parts collated together. He says he has ‘‘way too much – it’s not a cheap hobby’’.
‘‘What I tend to do is build things for the shows that we have all together. So I spend months building. One of the ones I did for the last show was on four 48 x 48 base plates and at a guess had about 6000 parts.’’
There are models that group members have made on display and Knight says he usually pulls his apart after a show. It is always a sad moment, but exciting too, because he will then start something new.
‘‘You want to build bigger and better and learn new techniques and your collection expands and the next thing you know, it’s a part of your life.’’
Brick Flicks is like the ultimate shrine to the plastic brick God.
As people leave the exhibition they can leave their names, in
Lego, on a giant baseplate wall. Up high, where only adult arms can reach, is a dragon head, complete with fire expanding out from the wall, a rainbow, which someone would have had to have pedantically searched for the right colours to make, and a lightning bolt.
In the lower reaches are gorgeously spelt-out names with multicoloured bricks and varying sized letters. It’s a changing daily tribute, where the words are on the wall in plastic graffiti.
Brick Flicks is free of charge and is on at Palmerston North’s Te Manawa until April 30.
‘‘I like the process of coming up with ideas and turning it into something physical.
Glenn Knight, Palmerston North liaison for the Wellington Lego Users Group