“He does have a rather cheeky bum,” Josie remarks. “Doesn’t he?”

Josie and Jonathan and I are sitting in the Artist’s Garden at Linton for afternoon tea. We’re considering the Mime’s new ass. A fine autumn afternoon spills warm light over the hills of New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula as evening fills into the sleepy harbor below us. Native Wood Pigeons whistle in to the cabbage trees that are full of the last seeds of summer. With the dwindling tourists this time of year, Josie gets to work adding more art to the garden. We’ve been busy molding concrete or gluing tiles into mosaics all day, and as the garden closes to visitors at 4p, we take a little respite that has become our convention, and observe the day’s progress from the lower terrace.

“The bum’s the most important part, really,” Jonathan offered with a smile. “You’ve got to get that roundness just right.”

“Yes, I quite like it.” Josie assured. “That’s nice work, Jonny.”

The Mime, a two and a half meter high figure modeled after Marcel Marceau, is the latest mosaic statue to be added to the Artist’s Garden at the Giant’s House Bed and Breakfast since I started woofing—I work a few hours a day in exchange for accommodation.

Linton, the Victorian house that towers behind us, has been here since 1880. The Giant’s House Bed and Breakfast, with its Artist’s Garden, is the creation of the New Zealand painter and sculptor Josie Martin, who has transformed Linton in just a few years from a dilapidated historic property into one of Akaroa’s—and even New Zealand’s—premier art attractions.

The lawn around the house sprouts the colorful abstractions of Josie’s steel sculptures, and the garden features countless mosaics, half a dozen of which are major constructions, including the centerpiece “Place des Amis,” which accommodates visitors in the laps of mosaic figures seated around a fountain.

On this day in the middle of May, several works displayed various stages of the process: Josie tiled a group of acrobats who form a retaining wall to one of the terraces, I was excavated the pond that will be ringed with lithe mosaic swimmers. Jonathan formed a row of surrealistic leaves in meter-high concrete, and under Josie’s direction, gave shape to the Mime.

Marcel leans at a rakish tilt against an imaginary mantle, facing the path on the upper terrace and offering a whimsical greeting where visitors enter. The result is that from where we sat with our tea, his well-rounded haunches loomed just above the hedge row at the top of the hill.

Once the concrete cures, Josie will apply the materials of her mosaics: chards of tile, bits of china and pottery, broken glass, shells, and stones. In the month since I began woofing, I have graduated from trimming back branches and excavating ponds to the task of grouting the mosaics. I mix up a big bucket of grout, put on a pair of thick rubber gloves and smother handfuls over the tiled figures, rubbing the mixture down in all the cracks and crevices. It’s a bit like giving the figures a mud massage.

“Grouting that bum should be interesting,” I joke between sips of coffee. This gets a chuckle, and Jonathan nods toward the nearby figures of Adam and Eve:

“You should have seen me grouting in the breasts on Eve over there.”

Josie breaks into a laugh, and nodding toward the anatomically correct and unambiguously masculine temptor figure, says:

“Yes, but the demon was most compromising.”

View the Giant’s House Photo Gallery

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