In this week’s “Inside LEGO Masters” article, Fleur Watkins from LEGO Masters Australia Season 3 gives us an inside look at her journey to becoming an AFOL, how LEGO Masters helped bring here there, and what being on a LEGO competition show meant to her as a woman and a mom.

Feminine Flavour

Classic Space, Pirates, Castles…as a child of the 1980s these were the LEGO bricks that entertained my young mind and they were absolutely wonderful, but how things have changed over the years and as I emerged from a dark age of around 32 years I found myself in a LEGO landscape where I could carve out my own artistic identity with a touch of feminine flavour and a passion to represent women in a world that perhaps is still populated more by the lads.

My name is Fleur and I recently appeared on LEGO Masters Australia Season 3 alongside my build partner and new friend Sarah. Sarah and I were paired by production and had not met in person until the night before filming. We were the only all-female team in our season of the show and were also the only all-female team across all 3 seasons of Australia to make it to finals week. A lot of elements of our dynamic and our journey on the show I feel were influenced by the double shot of estrogen that we brought to the building table. Before I delve into what I mean by this let me explain how I got back into LEGO as an adult and why it is so important to me.

Finding Fleur

In 2019 at the tender age of 42, I watched LEGO Masters Australia Season 1 and a little creative fire inside me started to burn. I was so inspired by the dynamic and whimsical builds being presented that I thought why not just try and see what I could create out of these humble bricks that I had played with so long ago. My husband bought me a 1500 classic bricks box for Mother’s Day and well, let’s just say his bank account probably regrets that decision because 2 years later I have a collection of around 150,000 bricks and it keeps growing.

I think every person deserves to have a vice, for some women it’s shoes, for me it is LEGO bricks, I can’t get enough! I started to create new MOCS every week honing my techniques by building the Creator Expert Modular sets and slowly started to uncover where my own identity as a builder sat. Perhaps stemming from my love of playing with dollhouses when I was a little girl, I found myself drawn to minifigure architecture and furniture initially, with my first big project being a MOC of a theatre complete with stage, orchestra pit and a bar in the foyer. I then moved on to building things that my little boy Heston (4 years old) would enjoy so I created a MOC of Flinders Street Station (which is a large train station in Melbourne), but where I found a real sense of joy was in creating LEGO food.

As a full-time stay-at-home Mum who gave up a very intense career in Event Management, I found that I was starting to lose my individuality a little bit. I used to be a highly creative person and now I was spending so much time just giving my all to my beautiful boy that I lost a sense of who I was. Never in a million years would I have thought it would be LEGO that would bring me back to myself and reconnect me with the artistic person I had inside me all the time. I found that the more I explored creativity through LEGO the happier I was, and it ultimately made me a better parent, while also being an activity that we can really enjoy together.

LEGO Building Artists

Fast forward to 2020 and by a strange twist of fate (and a push in the right direction from a dear friend Annie who appeared on LEGO Masters Australia Season 2) I found myself arriving for day one of filming feeling incredibly daunted and inexperienced but ready to give it my best shot.

From our first build, it was clear that Sarah and I just clicked. As women both in our 40s, both mothers, we had an unspoken agreement that whatever the challenge we would back each other and strive to do our best. For our first build, we had a “Stop in Your Tracks” challenge where we had to design something that would literally stop a train in its tracks. Sarah and I built a giant Geisha temple with Geisha’s in training presenting sushi platters to the deity as something unique but also a play on words with a “sushi train”. We were lucky enough to win that challenge and looking around the room it dawned on me that I think looking at our build you would know that it was designed by women, it just felt feminine.

From that moment forward we tried to put ourselves into our builds and celebrated the beauty in the bricks. Not every day was easy, we struggled with some of the more technical challenges or themed builds that were not in our wheelhouse, but whenever we had a more open artistic theme we tended to thrive. Our favourite challenge of the season was called “Colour My World” where all teams were presented with a black & white house, and we had to find a way of adding a pop of colour and being able to show via the bricks why that colour was there. We turned the house into a planter box and created a watering can that was colouring the flowers. In this challenge, I felt the most aligned with the bricks that I had throughout the season as I explored grey elements to create flowers and got extremely excited by the NPU possibilities that this brought about.

Whether creating food or flowers my favourite thing to do with LEGO is to look at the quality of the element rather than what it was originally designed for. Nothing makes me quite as happy as taking a two-by-two modified plate with octagonal bar frame and turning it into a cupcake or a flower, now that is me in full Bricknerd mode!

Celebrating Womanhood

During the airing of LEGO Masters Australia, Sarah and I were disappointed to be the fodder for some pretty unpleasant social media commentary and sadly some of that centred around us being mums or women and not being in their eyes good enough. At the time this definitely hit a nerve, but at the heart of it art is subjective and what someone hates someone else will love, so we tried really hard to just remind ourselves of the importance of representing women just like us who perhaps had lost themselves a little in their daily routine, and to whom LEGO might just be the key to unlocking some real joy and expression in themselves.

I love that I can celebrate my womanly curves through the bricks, that I can create things that are uniquely me with a feminine flavour while still taking so much inspiration from amazing builders of every gender. It is not about winning or being the best, or even whether people love what you create, it is about finding a piece of you in every day with every gorgeous brick you lay.

Do you know any other female LEGO builders we should spotlight? Let us know in the comment section below.

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