This video is made with the support of NZ on Air Public Interest Journalism Fund. 

Levi Hawken couldn’t give a damn about people’s perceptions.  

He’s one of those creative personalities that people think they know before they even meet him. Don’t bother trying to talk to him about viral video infamy - Hawken refuses to be pigeon-holed or told what he can or can’t do. His art - on his terms.

Consider this - in his last year of school, he took sculpture and got zero - as he puts it, “I didn't know what I wanted to make.”

But now, he’s making his living as a sculpture artist, his work heavily influenced by hip hop and skate designs of his youth.

“I just feel so lucky to have a space and be able to experiment,” Hawken states. “It’s exciting - every time you make something new that's cool and it sells, you feel like you're you're doing the right thing.

“The right people have always thought my art's cool - the wrong people don't probably know what art is.”

Hawken works largely in glass, concrete and glass metal structures in this current stage of his creative journey - but it all started on the streets - coming from a graffiti background.

“I spent from 1994 to about 2007 painting walls for free. The thing is you do that for so many years - you pour so much time, energy and money into all this stuff that just disappears - you reach a point where it's like. ‘hey you know what, I I want this stuff to stick around.’”

Hawken found the natural solution - mixing in his passion for street art with his work with concrete and landscaping. It provided the inspiration to use his creative streak to build skateable sculptures. “It felt like the natural thing for those shapes that were coming off the wall to keep coming off the wall,” he explains. “It’s just been such a fast evolution since then - I just kind of feel like I've found what I'm what I'm meant to do, which is make um three-dimensional sculpture.

“It’s just still the things the shapes, forms, colours and things that I found beautiful, it's just evolved a lot more and it's a lot more refined.

“The next thing I'd like to do is welding and start fabricating - just so that I can go bigger.”