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/

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