The Unmaking

John Bache
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Exploring the transformations necessary in creative practice - the work behind the work. Big or small, the moments when we sometimes have to let go of what once worked and deal with what follows. theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  1. 5d ago

    Everything’s interconnected.

    “The way that nature works is beautiful irrespective of its visual appearance. Everything’s interconnected. Everything operates in cyclical flows that produce more beauty, and more life, and more vigour, and more joy.”Environmental artist and photographer Martin Hill discovered rock climbing in the swinging sixties, the same decade he graduated as a graphic designer. The disparate needs and expectations of these two worlds caused much introspection over the coming years, until he learned how to combine both, interweaving his unique combination of skills and talents to share what he really had to say. The career that laid the visual communication foundation for it all was graphic design, and Martin spent two decades in well-paid, yet soul-searching, creative director roles across London, Nairobi, Sydney, and Auckland. A complex internal struggle provided a philosophical dilemma to this early career success, as Martin juxtaposed two versions of himself: the working-week version that would ignore the increasing volume of his conscience while applying his abilities to aid the influence of consumers; and the altogether more altruistic member of the human race, who would spend his weekends rock climbing with friends and enjoying wild nature.An overland trip to Everest at twenty, a near-fatal bout of hepatitis, real wilderness experience in East Africa while working in Nairobi, and eventually, in the early 1990s, an eco-design conference in Melbourne and a reckoning that changed the direction of his life. We talk about the climbing philosophy that led to his meeting Philippa Jones climbing at Lake Taupo, and how together they built a practice creating sculptures from nature - sand, ice, stone, reeds, leaves - photographing them, then leaving them to be reabsorbed back into the landscape from which they came. We cover Martin’s design career and his transition from graphic designer to environmental artist; building a life and a body of work alongside Philippa; the twenty-five year Fine Line Project that took their work to twelve points around the earth linked by a symbolic line; what it means to build an entire practice around the idea that nothing - neither sculpture, reputation, nor person - is too precious to be unmade; and what’s left behind when the whole point of your work is its ephemerality. Martin Hill in collaboration with Philippa Jones has exhibited in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, China, Europe and USA; published three books (Nature Works, Earth to Earth, and Fine Line); is the subject of a documentary film about his working practice (Delicate Canvas); and won a prize at the International Fine Art Photography Awards as well as a Pingyao International photography award for excellence. His projects were recently added to PhotoAnthology, the encyclopedia of photography’s art and history. He and Philippa were featured in the BBC documentary Nature and Us, a history through art. A new exhibition Burning Issues runs throughout November 2026 at Te Atamira in Queenstown. He lives and works with Philippa Jones in Wānaka, Aotearoa New Zealand. 🎙️ The Unmaking S02E01: Martin Hill. Environmental artist and photographer. Wānaka, New Zealand.https://www.martin-hill.com1964 Magazine subscription offer: www.1964.co.nz/unmaking This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  2. Aug 23

    S01E10: Jo Mills - Copywriter. The Outlet, Lake Wānaka

    Jo Mills and I met up at The Outlet, the point where Lake Wānaka becomes Mata-Au / the Clutha River. Jo and her then-boyfriend Nick first lived together here, in a tiny crib that’s now part of the campground, and it’s where Nick proposed, in the kitchen of that cottage in 2005. They’ve since camped here with their kids, walked the dogs here, and Jo still points to this spot and that time as the moment she realised Wānaka was going to be her home. Jo Mills is a writer working across Central Otago and beyond. Whether that’s as publicist for the Wānaka Festival of Colour and the At The World’s Edge chamber music festival, doing comms for zero-waste social enterprise Wastebusters, writing copy for luxury real estate brands, editing multi-million-dollar EU tenders, or, on one memorable occasion, proofreading a dystopian novel of epic proportions. Jo’s mother was a publisher who retrained as a doctor, her father a hobby cook who traded his suit jacket for an apron every evening, and words, flavour, and healing would go on to become the holy trinity of her own adult life.But before any of that, there was a girl who grew up in West London creating “newspapers” on the family’s bubble-jet printer, went on to study English at Oxford University, became so captivated by the world of wine at a tasting in her final year, that she pivoted from English Literature and studied for and completed the first of her wine-related qualifications during her holidays at Oxford. In 2003, after carpet-bombing New Zealand vineyards with emails asking for work, Jo arrived in Central Otago on the strength of a recommendation from Marks & Spencer’s wine buyer Sam Harrop (there’s lots more to do here than in Marlborough) and an offer to introduce and connect her into the local industry from Central Otago wine-growing pioneer Alan Brady. What followed was fifteen years building Rippon, one of Central Otago’s founding wine estates, from a two-person office in her mother-in-law’s house into what it is today. Through brutal frost years, the GFC, a year in the Beaujolais, and a pandemic that very nearly broke it all. It was also fifteen years spent learning where the boundaries of a marriage end and those of a family business begin. When she finally stepped back from her role at Rippon in 2021, she registered her trading name The Write Path on the Monday and watched the country go into lockdown by the Wednesday - a fateful timing quinella that would repeat itself the following year, when her son Toby’s life-changing spinal injury occurred on the very day she was offered a job interview elsewhere. We cover the unique challenges of marrying into such a storied family business; what you learn about small-town Aotearoa when your family’s in crisis; the conceptual evolution of her understanding of land ownership; how she’s dealing with the threat to her work posed by AI; and why, over twenty years after arriving at The Outlet, Jo’s third act is opening, and those still, deep waters are really just starting to flow. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

    S01E10: Jo Mills - Copywriter. The Outlet, Lake Wānaka

  3. Aug 12

    S01E09: Ed Leigh - Broadcaster & Producer. Wānaka

    "I pinch myself every day"We recorded this one sitting outside Ed Leigh’s home above Lake Wānaka’s Peninsula Bay. Bought as a bare section by Ed and his wife Sian back in 2019, they’ve built something that is, in his own words, the culmination of their personal and professional lives made real. In addition to the beautiful home and working spaces, there’s a micro skatepark on the driveway - as Ed puts it, it’d be criminal to pour concrete and not bend it up at the corners. Mountain bike trails start ten metres from the gate. Ed Leigh is one of snowboarding’s greatest ever ambassadors, and has become the voice of action sports for a generation of BBC viewers - nine Olympic Games across winter and summer, two decades of their legendary winter sport magazine show Ski Sunday - the commentator who was able to translate the nuances of sports like snowboarding, freeskiing, skateboarding, BMX or surfing into mainstream British living rooms like no other. He’s also co-founder of All Good Productions NZ, host and commentator for the Natural Selection snowboarding tour, and the Commercial Director driving Natural Selection Bike Aotearoa - an eight-year labour of love with sustainability built into its DNA from the ground up. But before all of that, there was a kid in Gloucestershire whose world got turned on its head when he saw his first ollie. He proceeded to get on a train to Swindon every weekend to skate the town’s mini ramp, lost his mind at the concept of “skateboarding on snow” after watching the sport on TV one morning, paid his dues on the local artificial slope (plastic bristles!), found his way to a snowboard shop in Chalford, and spent five winters in Val d’Isère before the busted knee that ended his professional snowboarding career and accelerated his transition into roles such as magazine editor, MC, commentator, producer, and event organiser. A string of live events from festival vert ramps to inner-city snowboard contests inadvertently started his broadcasting apprenticeship, so that by the time the BBC came calling in 2005, he’d already spent a decade learning how to captivate a mainstream audience without losing the sport’s core. What followed were lives built around the dichotomy of managing absence and maximising presence - relocating the family from Europe to Auckland so Sian could have her parents close while he was gone for the Northern Hemisphere winter, years of January and February without a summer holiday with his kids, a Red Bull contract that pulled them back to Europe and three formative years in Verbier, and eventually the return to Aotearoa, this time to Wānaka, and to something that finally feels permanent. We cover what it means to be an industry lifer; saying yes to too much and rocking in the bath wondering how it all went wrong; what it takes to build a life and maintain a marriage across opposite hemispheres; straddling the conservative world of mainstream broadcasting and the action sports culture that made you; what snowboarding gained and lost by going Olympic; and why, thirty years on, he’s still going sideways fast and bending the concrete up at the corners. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  4. Aug 4

    S01E08: Carmen Hubber - Designer. Arrow Junction, Queenstown

    A handshake kind of girlWhen Carmen Hubber’s daughter Ruby was born in 2003, she walked away from a senior interior design role at McKenzie & Willis, printed 200 business cards, and took Ruby’s pram cold-calling local businesses in Queenstown. She secured two commissions that first week - an apartment and a bar fit-out - and Carmen Hubber Interior Design was born. What followed were two recessions, a divorce, and COVID. The 2009-10 period hit hardest: Carmen lost her home and studio and found herself close to $200,000 in debt. She could have walked away. Instead, she paid back every cent. It wasn’t just resilience that got her through, it was family role modelling: Carmen’s father, who’d reinvented himself many times; her aunt, who rang her a decade after her mini-mart closed to say she’d just paid back the last dollar she owed. Carmen had absorbed those lessons about character and was able to draw on them when it mattered most. Today, Hub Design operates from a dream property just outside Queenstown - 650 square metres of garaging, spectacular alpine views of the Remarkables and Coronet Peak, and a new design studio and showroom.Carmen’s team feels like family for good reason. Daughter Ruby manages all 3D rendering/ kitchen design and has been with the business five years. Jason, Carmen’s partner, an engineer who builds race motors, handles project management and fabrication. Kate and Sharon have been on the team for five and ten years respectively and are integral to the inner workings of the business, and a third award-winning designer, Leonie, has just come on board this year. The next chapter will also involve designing and making one-off pieces - cocktail cabinets, bespoke furniture, things that can’t be found anywhere else - from her new space close to Queenstown’s Arrow Junction. Carmen has always known that what many interior design clients really want is something nobody else has, and now she’s getting ready to give it to them. When not at work, tinkering, skiing, on the lake, or relaxing at home, she’ll be out riding her Indian or her Harley. The bikes are her meditation. No music - just the noise of the motor, the nuances of the corners, and the push and pull of motor and brakes as she accelerates into the future. Internet: www.hubdesign.nzInstagram: @hubdesigninteriors This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  5. Jul 21

    S01E07: Laura Williamson - Writer. Dean’s Bank, Albert Town

    Laura Williamson arrived in Wānaka the week of the big flood of 1999. The water had just receded, the high water mark was still visible on the supermarket walls, and her partner immediately found a job taking apart, cleaning, re-lubing, and reassembling flood-damaged bikes. She’d initially come to Aotearoa from Toronto, where she’d been dying on the inside at an overwhelmed EFTPOS machine call-centre, asking herself where the furthest place from her cubefarm hellscape might be. New Zealand had been on her personal hard drive since she was nine years old, when she’d had her young mind blown by seeing the confluence of the Clutha and the Kawarau - one river had been brown, the other blue, violently bleeding into each other. After some time in Methven, she thought she was coming to Wānaka for a season. That was over twenty-five years ago. In that time she’s built one of the most prolific and multi-faceted writing lives in the country. She’s written for the ODT, North and South, Kia Ora, The Dominion Post, The Melbourne Age, Theatreview, and Mountain Biking Australia. She edited mountain bike magazine Spoke. She wrote The Bike and Beyond, a book about cycling that in a very meta way became the thing that changed her life again. She taught English at Mount Aspiring College for a decade, ran the performing arts festival The Festival of Colour Te Kaupeka Rau, toured poetry through Central Otago village halls with all production equipment towed behind electric mountain bikes, and co-founded and now edits 1964 magazine - the quarterly “mountain culture” print journal out of Wānaka that the UK’s Guardian called “an example of how print might be reinvented”. We meet at the entrance to the Dean’s Bank Track, precariously straddling the exposed roots of a row of massive creaking pines overlooking the Clutha. It’s a river she comes to think beside, and a track she enjoys riding, highly appreciative of the work of those who designed and built it. It’s also a good spot to explore the essence of what writing’s actually for, and the communion she felt as a reader that made her want to get to the other side of the words. Laura explains how the flow state she finds on a bicycle opens words up, the Rail Lines poetry tour that turned her love of cycling into a short film about a series of Pied Piper-esque performances, where poems were drawn from envelopes pegged to a spinning bike wheel, and new poetry fans were baptised in echoey village halls across Central Otago. We get into what mountain towns do to creative people and what happens when things get expensive, why the arts have a branding problem, what print offers that screens can’t, and her belief in, and advocacy for, the depth of culture and creativity in our remote places.If this conversation resonates, please subscribe to 1964 at 1964magazine.co.nz. You can learn more about Laura via Instagram (@laura_willwritefor). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

    S01E07: Laura Williamson - Writer. Dean’s Bank, Albert Town

  6. Jul 7

    S01E06: Ben Wallbank - Filmmaker. Tititea / Mt. Aspiring Lookout

    The character traits that emerged so unexpectedly in the immediate aftermath of a car crash - the way he instinctively knew what to do, and how to do it - felt so deeply biologically anchored, they laid a career foundation that went unquestioned for the next fifteen years of Ben Wallbank’s life. A foundation that served him incredibly well, but also one that felt like it might have been keeping him from the thing he was supposed to be doing. He’s only recently begun to see things differently, better appreciating the transferability of some of the skills from those earlier roles, as he was unwittingly learning important aspects of what would go on to serve him extremely well in his chosen craft as a filmmaker.Ben grew up in Worthing on England’s south coast, with itchy feet and an interest in photography. At 17, what he learnt about himself the night of the car accident led him to join the police, where he rose through counter-terrorism and organised crime to become one of the youngest Tactical Flight Officers in the UK, accumulating thousands of hours operating helicopter gimbal cameras at altitude. In 2014, aged 29, he sold his camera and bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand, where he became a rescue helicopter crewman in Taranaki, spent a brief time with the NZ Police in Nelson, and in the background, was filming, photographing, and posting things online just for himself, until a film festival in the United States got in touch about one of his videos. His first response was incredulity, and seven years later, although he’s become an award-winning documentary director and expedition filmmaker, he still isn’t taking anything for granted. His film The Adventure of Racing, that he shot solo, covering an adventure racing team through the Fiordland backcountry, won Best Documentary at the NZ Mountain Film Festival 2024 and went on to screen on Sky TV and Amazon Prime. Onwards, his confronting documentary following physiotherapist Helene Barron’s battle with aggressive tongue cancer, was selected as a finalist at the 2025 Doc Edge Film Festival. His broadcast and commercial credits include Race to Survive: New Zealand on the USA Network, Apple TV, Red Bull TV, and FIS World Cup broadcast camera work. We parked Flø by the Tititea / Mt Aspiring lookout at Glendhu Bay - a spot Ben always slows down for when driving past, to acknowledge the mountain - and had a conversation about the long way round, and whether detours are ever really detours at all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  7. Jun 23

    S01E05: Jenny Chisholm - landscape painter. Glendhu Bay.

    S01E05. Jenny Chisholm. Landscape painter.Landscape guides meJenny Chisholm was “unmade” for the first time at two weeks old. Offered up. Then chosen. Adopted into a Bay of Plenty farming family, the youngest of five, with free range of the bush and paddocks from the moment she could walk. She's been drawing on that first monumental act ever since: in her landscapes, in the family she built, in the way she shows up fully, wherever she is. We're parked at the edge of Glendhu Bay, looking north across Lake Wānaka to the mountains that speak to her, and have ever since she and a girlfriend first visited the Matukituki Valley in a Bedford camper van over 30 years ago. There are some parallels between how Jenny became an artist and how she became a mother, but neither path followed a straight line. After leaving school at 16 to become a hairdresser (a career she pursued at the highest national levels for fifteen years) she unwittingly learned the fundamentals of sculpture - looking at a “blank canvas” of material, and knowing what she needed to remove to unveil the artwork hidden underneath. Jenny spent her late twenties as a trailing spouse, together with engineer husband Neville exploring and working in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and later India. These adventures included opening a yoga studio and art space in Delhi, where she shared her artistic knowledge and skill with street children, doing, as she puts it, most of her real personal growth in such places where life was hard. Upon returning home to start a family in 1998, Jenny retrained as an artist in Tauranga, graduating with a Diploma in Art, Craft, and Design, and when nature and science failed to provide biological children, there was a special circularity to the concept of adoption. The children arrived fast: a son with just four days' notice, a daughter eight months later, and as if there wasn’t enough happening, these joyous life additions were accompanied by a relocation to Christchurch, then Central Otago. It was here that Jenny illustrated the children's book Shrek: The Famous Hermit Sheep Of Tarras for the local primary school, learning to paint in watercolours from a nearby caravan, while the school's children learned how to change her baby's nappies. That book is now in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and has gone on to sell well over 50,000 copies, funding computers and a second full-time teacher at the school. After years of supplying commercial galleries around New Zealand, Jenny made a conscious decision to move toward something more direct: artist-run collectives and public studios, that enable conversations with strangers who wander in while she's painting, and stay longer than they planned.  What comes through the work - the semi-surreal landscapes, the skies and clouds, the ghostly guardians, the trees encouraging us to look up - is an artist who has spent a long time learning to wait before she acts. Her personal mantra, “stop, pause, reflect”, didn't come from yoga or India, but organically from within: absorbing what she feels before trying to make something from it. There's a heaviness in some of the paintings. The weight of the world's in them, but so are the mountains, and the water, and the light on both. Jenny's been watching and seeing it all, every day, filing things away in her visual diary, waiting for the moment when she’s finished reflecting, the feeling is right, and she knows it’s time to paint.Instagram: @jenny.chisholmFacebook: @jennychisholmnzartistArté Collective: www.artecollective.nz This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

  8. Jun 16

    S01E04: Tony “Buzz” Burrows. Pendant light designer

    S01E04: Tony “Buzz” Burrows. Pendant light designer The Universe Inside a Ping-Pong Ball  Tony Burrows is a designer and artist, former director of photography, and the man behind Central Otago’s Buzz Burrows lighting brand. After thirty years working with light in the film and television industry, rising through the ranks from runner to director of photography and producer/ director, filming in the Okavango Delta for National Geographic, and crewing on documentaries for Sir Peter Blake's environmental initiative, a life threatening illness was the circuit-breaker that allowed him to change directions, pursue new creative opportunities, and start making light you can hold. . What emerged from that garage is Buzz Burrows: beautiful, considered pendant lights that draw on Conceptualism, Light and Space, Minimalism, and Geometric Abstraction, made from timber, wool, and whatever materials Tony can source with the least carbon miles attached. In 2023 he won the Xero Beautiful Business Fund global prize - beating more than 5,500 applicants across seven countries - and used the money to buy himself a laser cutter and some breathing room.We're parked outside his studio and home near Lake Hawea, looking north to the jagged brown peaks of Central Otago - a landscape Tony chose deliberately, drawn by family history stretching back to the 1860s, and a conviction that the South Island offered something his children needed. He's the first to admit, it's an unlikely place to run a manufacturing business, but is also quick to point out that limitations such as this or New Zealand's small market can be both a constraint and an enabler - the things that make certain creative lives harder than they need to be, but with the right mindset or perspective, also the things that can fuel a particular kind of creative resourcefulness. He’s watched incredibly talented musicians and other artists struggle to make ends meet - not due to lack of ability, but lack of population. Aotearoa New Zealand could be the Denmark of the South Pacific when it comes to design, but isn't yet. Our conversation moves between the hierarchical discipline of the film set and the solitude of the workshop, between the frustrations of realising someone else's vision for thirty years and the particular pressures of being accountable only to yourself. Tony talks about the year he spent living inside the Okavango Delta and what an intact ecosystem does to how you understand consequence, and about the design challenge he finds endlessly absorbing: making an object that has to be beautiful twice - once in daylight, and once again at night. We also discuss the difference between people who can be creative and people who are compelled to be - who are simply wired that way, regardless of whether it's convenient or comfortable or financially sensible. Tony’s clearly the latter, and has been that way since he was a child. The creative urge, he says, can sometimes feel like a curse. But living near Lake Hawea, surrounded by mountains, with a 10-metre daily commute to make things with light in the home studio he designed and built together with his wife Tracy, Buzz Burrows is a man who knows exactly how fortunate he is, and is careful to take none of it for granted. https://buzzburrows.com/https://www.instagram.com/buzzburrows.nz/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

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About

Exploring the transformations necessary in creative practice - the work behind the work. Big or small, the moments when we sometimes have to let go of what once worked and deal with what follows. theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    John Bache
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © John Bache
  • Show Website
    The Unmaking