It’s a tiny subject, but a big question: why are humans innately drawn to miniatures? Is it something about rediscovering the power we felt as children playing with toys, little gods in charge of our own dominions? Is it because these small worlds feel reassuringly contained among all the chaos of our own? Is it sheer appreciation for the delicacy and patience required to make them? Or is it simply because watching someone cook tiny meals over a tealight (86m views and counting) is really, really cute?

If, like me, you are mad for small things, you will appreciate the work of David Hourigan, whose new exhibition is dedicated to his models of beloved music venues around Melbourne. His intricate miniatures are so realistic that it can be hard to tell whether you are looking at a photo of the Espy or the Tote – until Hourigan’s big hands loom into view, popping a matchstick down to reveal the scale of his painstaking work. It is very soothing to watch him construct a perfect CCTV camera out of a Carlsberg can, or piece together colonial windows with tweezers.

“I have great eyesight and steady hands, but I have pretty chunky fingers – so tweezers are my friend,” says Hourigan.

The 51-year-old loved making model Spitfires as a child, but walked away “when I discovered girls”. He returned to his hobby in his 30s, by then working as a graphic designer. “It’s so much more satisfying working with your hands and producing physical things than moving pixels on screen,” he says. In 2019, he quit his job to try making miniatures professionally for six months; six years later, he’s still at it.

Hourigan started out by making buildings he loved in his suburb, Yarraville, in Melbourne’s inner west. He made the Sun Theatre, a beloved art deco cinema, as well as “a few places around here that meant something to me, places I wanted to capture before they go” – like an electrical substation in neighbouring Seddon, his favourite project because “it is the one where I realised I can do this”.

It was during the Covid lockdowns that Hourigan made Cherry Bar, a much-loved music venue formerly on Melbourne’s AC/DC Lane. (Oasis’s Noel Gallagher was so taken with the lifesize bar that he offered to buy it while on tour). “I was missing getting out there in the world and seeing music and being social, so I thought, I’ll make one just for my own joy,” Hourigan says. But the theme of music venues stuck.

Hourigan tends to make venues where he has seen great shows; others are icons that closed long before he even moved to Melbourne 20 years ago. “I sometimes see a photo of an old venue and it has personality, a bit of charm, a bit of zest about it, and I think, ‘that’s too good not to make’. I don’t enjoy making things pristine. I want them to have a bit of grunge.”

The Tote, one of his smaller models, took three weeks of full-time work; St Kilda’s Espy, on the bigger side, took two months. The trickiest – and “most boring” – part is the first step: cutting the building’s basic shape from blue modelling foam. “It’s the little tricky details that I love making; that’s when it comes alive,” says Hourigan.

Life is found in the cigarette butts, the band posters, the rusty gutters, the seagulls and beer kegs. “That’s when I am really playing God,” he says. Some of his miniatures perfectly capture a venue in a particular moment of time; on others, he makes some artistic tweaks: “The graffiti on these buildings can be a bit shit.”

Along the way, Hourigan has discovered new things about himself – he finds stamping individual bricks meditative and he has a knack for “making little air conditioners and TV antennas”. He also has a new appreciation for unexpected materials – like the foil seal on whisky bottles, which is both soft and strong and therefore good for making organic shapes, like a tiny banana peel.

The responses to his tiny music venues are often emotional: “I have people who tell me that’s where they had the best night of their life, that’s where they met their future partner – and that’s all before you get to the music.”

He likes to make the venues that have closed or are in danger of closing. “I want to preserve these before they disappear.”

While he was making the Gasometer Hotel, the owners announced the Collingwood venue was closing due to soaring insurance bills. “It is happening across the whole industry; it’s really sad,” Hourigan says. He went to the Gaso to capture it as it was on its last day – and his miniature recreates it down to the stickers on the ashtrays.

But sometimes the opposite happens too. A couple of years ago, after Hourigan made a model of the Punters Club, which had closed down in 2002, the building’s new owners contacted him to say the outpouring of affection towards the Fitzroy institution among his fans had helped shape their decision to bring it back as a live music venue. “To play a tiny part in that is pretty exciting,” says Hourigan.

There is one venue he wants to make, but hasn’t yet: West Melbourne’s Festival Hall. “I saw the Pogues there eight years ago. Best gig I’ve ever been to. Loved it. But it’s just such an ugly building!” He laughs. “Now I like to find the beauty in the everyday and the rundown – but it is pug ugly.”

• David Hourigan’s exhibition Loud, Live and Loved is on at Off the Kerb Gallery, Collingwood, 17-31 July