Levin artist Jody Burgess can get lost. For hours.
He goes into a “cave” and returns when he’s ready, having crafted another piece of work.
His art is not arrived at through brush and paint, but rather from carving and sculpting in his backyard.
The “caves” to which he retreatsare repurposed shipping containers that house a wall-to-wall array of intricate tools that grind, polish, cut and chisel stone or wood into art. It’s organised chaos, but you get the feeling he knows exactly where everything is.
Burgess, 56, started carving three years ago and simply hasn’t stopped. He was mostly self-taught. He started off tinkering with coins and tiny stones, but now his work is progressing in size and scale.
Levin artist Jody Burgess was influenced in his art having researched his whakapapa.
The next project is to sculpt a huge volcanic rock from Taranaki that arrived by truck a few weeks ago. It’s in his backyard on a pallet. Once finished, it would easily be his largest work yet.
Burgess said he did art as a School Certificate subject in the fifth form and failed miserably “along with many other subjects”.
“But I liked art and am finally at an age now where I can do it. I was always rip, s*** and bust, never stopping. Now I can come in here ... it’s taught me to slow down and focus on one thing at a time, doing something I enjoy.”
A piece of work from Levin artist Jody Burgess.
“I was a lunatic and couldn’t sit still for two minutes, but I can come out here and carve for six hours straight ... and keeping my hands occupied is good for my cigarette smoking.”
“Like many artists, I’ve got a few hang-ups, but it would be good to one day get a point where I can say, wow, I did that.”
Burgess was influenced in his art having researched his whakapapa. His hobby took on more meaning as a result and became a full-blown passion.
“That’s the interesting thing. I could have carved anything. I’m on this journey. I’m still on this journey,” he said.
Jody Burgess with tiki he has carved from pounamu. The one on the left was one of his first, the other one of his latest.
He had enrolled in a course at Te Wanganga o Raukawa in Ōtaki and saw himself as a lifelong student of art, learning how to express the telling of a story through his work.
He began carving tiki and had now created many working koauau.
“You start carving cos, I don’t know, you see a beautiful piece of wood and carve it and turn it into something,” he said.
“I hope I have enough time left in life that I can do something that I will be proud of.”
He said he liked the permanence of stone and saw more than just rock or pebble, conscious of the forces required in the stone’s formation and its life cycle.
“It all returns to the earth eventually,” he said.
Burgess has made the odd wedding ring before when asked, but mostly his work goes into a box and when he’s ready he starts again on the next one. There is no end game. It’s simply a passion.
It’s probably no coincidence his art had a physical element as he was a fitter/turner by trade and had spent time working with steel on high-rise buildings in the US, while he had also worked in animation for companies like Atari and Time Warner.
Burgess has lived in Levin for the past two decades. For many years he also operated a successful parrot ranch south of Levin that was popular with tourists and school groups.
