Awesome Australian-built Lego sculptures on show in Hamilton

Ryan "Brickman" McNaught has created his third exhibition made entirely from Lego bricks. Photo / Supplied

The school holiday is just around the corner and with it, a great number of activities for old and young, like the Brickman Awesome exhibition at Claudelands Event Centre, Hamilton.

Not only for kids and Lego lovers, the exhibition features 37 awesome, but not specifically Kiwi themed, Lego sculptures ranging from animals to well-known international landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, to a Nasa space rocket.

Australian Ryan "Brickman" McNaught is the creative head behind the exhibition and one of 14 Lego-certified professionals in the world - and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere. With the help of a five-headed building team, Ryan created all sculptures within a year, especially for the exhibition.

It is his third exhibition made entirely from Lego bricks and has been touring Australia, as well as being shown in Auckland.

Centrepiece of the exhibition is a 3m-tall orca. Lego artist Centuri Chan helped bringing the Australian exhibition to New Zealand. He says: "The orca is made out of Lego Duplo bricks to show that Duplo is not only for little kids. It's very versatile and you can build lots of cool things with it."

Centuri has been working with Ryan since 2013, when the two Lego fanatics worked on the Wonders of the World project. While he helped building a lot of the sculptures back then, this time he was more on the designing part of the exhibition.

Image 1 of 8: The organisers put a lot of detail and pop culture references into the exhibition like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader having their iconic lightsaber fight. Photo / Danielle Zollickhofer

His favourite piece of the Awesome exhibition is a model of the DeLorean car from the Back to the Future movies. "I am a bit of an 80s nerd and a fan of the movies from that time, so the DeLorean is a bit of a nostalgic piece for me. And I like the male emperor penguin, because I helped designing it."

It took three days to set up the exhibition at Claudelands, although every showpiece arrived pre-built. Most of them arrived whole, but some sculptures, like the Nasa rocket, arrived in pieces and had to be assembled on site.

"Every piece in the expo has an awesome factor. The orca for example is the largest dolphin species in the world, and the rocket is the tallest model in the Southern Hemisphere. We also put in a lot of detail and pop-culture references into the exhibition to add an extra dimension and give people a laugh."

Centuri says the exhibition had a really good response when it was shown in Auckland with about 100,000 people visiting.

"The whole idea is to make it an educational and interactive experience with lots of play tables with Lego for visitors to have a play themselves. There are info sheets featuring the stats and facts of the project as well as information about the real subject. We also have a competition to find Mr and Mrs Awesome figurines hidden within the sculptures."

Brickman Awesome runs until August 1. Tickets are $24.50 for an adult and $14.50 for kids, and are available to be booked online here.