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Playing Field

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, 'We recognise this scene set, with its moon above and stars left on', 2010 Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, 'We recognise this scene set, with its moon above and stars left on', 2010

Essay by Joe Pascoe

Childhood is often viewed as a landscape but it seems to happen mostly in the mind.

Each of the artists in Playing Field offers a personal perspective that relies on remembered contexts, vying for intuitive understandings of key events or distinct periods of time.

Many convey the feeling that childhood is a zone of ‘rights and wrongs’, where things and events shaped their future worlds – small narratives with great power challenge the routine carefully instilled by society and its agents, mum and dad. Adventure and imagination are mixed together to create these amazing craftworks.

But mum and dad are out for the night, placing the children and their dreams together in their own worlds, so let’s go inside to see what’s happening.

Ben Pearce takes you right inside his head with the work Curse, offering a tactile notion of the brain as a rock sculpture, trussed together with twigs; the head and neck suggestively linked to depict the brain and spinal cord as an uprooted plant. He writes of Curse, ‘... replacing organs such as ears and a brain with a plethora of rocks suggests these may have been magically turned to stone by a spell or curse or, alternatively, that they could be suggestive of a particular state of mind.’

He writes of himself in the third person; ‘Pearce creates sanctuaries, such as Cavern, in which memories can shelter from harm, loss and anonymity. Adapted, weathered and polished, these places seem more like manifestations of emotion rather than representations of the actual object themselves’.

Operating both inside and outside his work, he uses the form to quietly express weight, temperature and some kind of reverence through the tonality of the piece. It is childhood rendered with the soft armoury of a small boy – hoping that sticks and stones won’t hurt you, and that words never will.

Michael Doolan takes us somewhere else. We observe the familiar forms of childhood, somehow stripped of key clues. Why does bunny not have a face? What horror has occurred? In Once Upon a Time (Federation Square installation) we witness the collision between the evil train and poor dumb teddy, as the locomotive careers down the track, forever arrested at the moment of impact. That train represents an event and that teddy represents a person.

This is a childhood that never ends. Indeed it is one of the great deceits of adulthood to imagine that a childhood is ever over. As Sigmund Freud was so keen to argue, in each of us runs a noisy, emotional kid. The conundrum of where does it stop and when does it end is caught and snap-frozen in If Pluto was a dog...

Here the tale is of animalised being humanised and made to operate in another world as a construct of a modern scene. For Doolan, Pluto stands out in a Mickey Mouse world for his vulnerability and uncertain status – reflecting the dichotomies of childhood. The lesson is that when we remember our own childhood, we have to be prepared to invent a new dialogue for the long-past events, to fit the sequel of adulthood. The story of what it is to grow is caught in Pluto’s stance. He puffs and expands, simultaneously small but huge. Things in the mind are ever so. Coyote and Possum displayed together invite a dialogue familiar to any child who arranges his fluffy toys for endless contests and dialogues that prep for the so-called real world.

This journey through the ephemeral continues via Greer Honeywill’s Off the Plan. Wood, horse hair and a found red tricycle are compressed together, squashing time and reason in the process. Off the Plan is a grown-up toy that invites quiet contemplation. The Rapunzel-like  horse tail disappears into an Escher-esque box – who’s inside? Do all the little children in all the little suburban streets have the same little nightmares?

The smooth clean materials convey the weird purity of being young – so good yet so intense. Honeywill uses a parred down aesthetic to isolate her subject. The tricycle has a worn appearance speaking of the genuine nature of childhood – countered by the precisely made bland architectural construction. Due to the lack of a subject, we interpose ourselves, ascending and descending the steps in an endless game.

Tim Fleming’s paintings peer out with a sense of benign resignation. Drawing of a clay sculpture from 1986 is a new work that re-tells a clay portrait of over 20 years ago. It acts as a bridge for the artist to travel back and forth through time, perhaps to measure the effect of society’s demands as forecast by the wearing of the tie in the original piece. Imaginary night scene isolates some very simple items – a match with a toy helmet, a dice and a radio/TV – as random components of a mini-frieze. We can form interpretations or insert our own memories, prompted by the sense of space and permission to explore.

In these works Fleming has kept true to his 3D work (known as ‘Flatland’) by similarly modelling the psychological space available on the picture plane. It is childhood gracefully distilled. The works shift between positive and negative space, and float as in a dream. Perspective is used as a representation of thought itself.

Most of the objects in the Flatland OK range are machined as well as hand crafted, using marine ply with an acrylic facing. The two-dimensional designs are extruded to create the third dimension, with the fourth dimension of time arriving through the act of play. In childhood, play is not an act, it is the real thing. And in Fleming’s work, society’s great symbols are humbled by their reversion to antecedent pasts as elements in a game. This reversal is achieved through the scale of the work and the simplicity of the colours; like sharpened pencils they convey a sense of glee about themselves.

The post-colonial makes a comeback in the actions and work of Anna Davern. Using old biscuits tins – borrowed from the tastebuds of the post-war ‘Made in England’ period of Australian consumerism, Anna snips and shapes the tins into new life. With careful editing and juxtapositioning of actual pictorial elements, she gives new readings of childhoods past. Faint strains of the Teddy Bear’s picnic seem to resonate in the works, as they sweetly play within their dioramas. The muted colors and the charm of the material gently lull the senses, whilst keen observations push beyond nostalgia, to form a link between the past and the present. As social satire the works are convincing. They look ‘... at our physical and psychological relationship to objects. The medium of jewellery is an excellent vehicle for this investigation due to its history of being a token of sentiment’, she reports.

Davern’s cut tin biscuit tins with their movable parts play on the hallucinogenic quality of the Australian bush. From behind the classic European trees and the sailing ship, cartoon monsters swing out, threatening to scare the viewer, who actively participates in the work by operating the mechanism – just like an old-time penny arcade.

As chimeras their hybridized forms recall the collage of emotions that early settlers felt when first confronted by Australia’s wondrous animals. Things which we regard as cute and cuddly become sinister, as they may have been perceived when first seen. For Davern, childhood is the place where imagination is allowed to tip over into horror, where emotions can freeze or boil, where thought becomes embedded in illusionary narratives.

Her Postcard series takes this journey further away, with each tin card revealing a single moment. These snippets of tin are badges of a time and place, exhibited on mass like an album of experiences. The journey is one of travelling through our history, which like the biscuit tins, is a history imagined and felt through short, sharp juxtapositions.

Anika Cook’s way of crafting incorporates the digital realm, synthesising such influences as steel engravings, early photography and contemporary surrealism into a series of digital collages that function like a pictorial Charles Dickens. We sense the back-stories as very long narratives of which we are finally seeing the last page of a particular chapter.

For Cook, the common element is the use of literary and storybook sources; ‘My work varies in medium between collage and paper work to fabric and fashion, but has a common element in the use of literary and storybook sources.  Employed both thematically and physically,  I use the language, the ideas and the pages of books.  This allows my work to exist in a constructed storybook nether world, steeped in narrative, pursuing adventure and meeting talking elephants along the way.’ These works ‘… deal particularly with notions of imagination and adventure, sited with the idea of the imaginary friend.  Each piece takes place solely in an imagined world, allowing for a layering of meaning and story but resisting a complete and understandable picture’. The titles of her works, such as Ah, Sun-flower, weary of time (The sick flower in bed) and A portrait by owl-light (The seated portrait painter) remind us that poetry and craft were once one!

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison also address the picture plane as a rich screen-like surface, animating their surfaces with magical tricks and puzzles, whilst conjuring doors into new realities. Digital techniques are used to scour thousands of worlds, splicing, editing and constructing data files which are then very carefully printed into new icons – just like the brain does with its memories.

The circularity of the research and reward process speaks to the special character of the crafts, where process often informs the end content. It is an opposite of post-modernism, as the adventure leads the viewer to a confirmed, sure place, however subtle and shadowy to define. The ultimate source material is that place in the mind, where childhood and strange new emotions are born.

Haby and Jennison recognise that the nascent origin of a journey or story is often the chance association of an event within a convincing emotion envelope of a particular place and time. It is more a Jean Jacques Rousseau realm, where order is questioned and yet the underlying social contract remains somehow intact – pledged as it is to safety and individuality.

To read their pictures, just pretend you are one of the curious animals in the frame!

Jennifer Bartholomew embraces childhood directly in her work, offering a symbolic construction of fabricated toys, watercolors and found-object constructions and a small TV video. Arranged like a family hallway, a washing-line of water-colors holds up irrepressible images of play – horses, running rabbits and the like – whilst in the foreground sits a tableau of a child’s table and chairs, from whose imagination the imagery springs.

In between, handmade children’s caps and rough broom-horses rest as evidence of invented adventures and far away travels. Amongst the warm rich familiar textures, the arrangement speaks of the freedom of childhood and the tender task of parents in supporting this wondrous world.

The table and chairs and coat-rack represent the home, whilst the caps snuggly reference the little people who become big people, and the dolls somehow tell of this changeling world. In the video we see young Ben gently communing with a cowboy-style horse – who seems so friendly and accepting of his young charge.

By placing herself in the work, via her child, Bartholomew establishes a duality that echoes the continuity of life – one which she describes as a never ending thread, rolling out from a spool of cotton tumbling on the floor.

One feels falsely safe in the imagery of Bern Emmerichs. Each painted figure is a part of a tribe, each person’s experiences coming together as a mosaic within a shared tableau. That after all is how childhood is sometimes defined by society. However, playing fields for  Emmerichs ‘... are not always a field of fun. They can take on a serious and somber tone, often becoming battle grounds where free movement is restricted and frolicking kept to a minimum’.

In Hopscotch Queen ‘...panic and anxiety became the order of the day, as children scramble into military mode...’ falling into line to salute the flag and sing the national anthem; following the chime of the school bell. Bottled Ship depicts 220 young convict boys bound for Van Diemans Land in 1842, with no play permitted. Their pasts and lives can only be imagined. Pickets and Crosses is dedicated to the stolen generations, for whom the openness of their upbringing was replaced by Christian guilt, loss and numbing order. This was a place dominated by fear and stiff gender roles. These three works present three childhood realities that tell of society’s inclination for order as a means of control.

The 12 year old boy in David Ray’s ceramics is simultaneously certain and searching. Cast in the mould of an eternal child, both modern and 18th century, he stares into his own destiny. Rays’ teenage characters’ are starting to break out from the cocoon of early childhood, and are at the point of beginning to negotiating their way into adult reality.

Thus Ray is depicting childhood at a mid-point, with the physical and emotion journey only part completed. The jolly color scheme belies the gravity of being alive. In Death Stick the boy twists and tenses as he plays his game, trying to escape the comfy parental chair into a new, private world of electronic lights and bleeps – the face morphing into a monster. Boy with Ball is kinder but somehow forlorn. His simple pathos caught by the held green ball and the comical dog. Finally, Boy on a Bicycle captures the fledging act of freedom that riding a bike bestows.

Ray melds his ceramics with an immediacy that affirms the reality of what it is to be young. Your clothes, your shoes, what you are doing with your hands, tell the story of who you are and perhaps what you will do next. We feel like parents watching on, knowing yet not owning the boy who is on his own island.

In the end, the argument that raising children is essentially a recapitulative process, carried on by ‘mum and dad’ on behalf of society, is challenged by virtually all of the craftworks in Playing Field. The makers regularly refer to the need for creative freedom, in answer to the demands of society.

It is apparent that children are increasingly raised by the world rather than the village; so much information is now openly shared through screens and conversations all around us. Moral dichotomies seamlessly tumble forth every day. We see, we try to believe, we give up, we believe again. Our children remain self-selecting as always, and we pray that they will negotiate these virtual and actual playgrounds with enough rationality to find happiness. 

The craftworks in Playing Field are indicative of one of the great transition periods in human history. Never has so much change occurred over such a vast landscape of human endeavor – be it religious, social or economic – and the impact on contemporary craft has been profound.

In general, the crafts lend themselves to a certain cultural honesty. Perhaps it is the layering of technique over intent to produce content that makes it so. A shared position in Playing Field is the willingness of the makers to reveal their feelings and thoughts to us, whilst working so masterfully to create objects of such coherence. And it points to us standing in a special time in history, as the works are in fact signposts as well as maps that chart where the makers have been. Their purpose as objects is to make sense of the complex pathways we all experience in life’s journeys - to give a sense of hope and direction.

We can rejoice in the inherent wonder of the craftworks in Playing Field, knowing that whatever the issues, there is still the possibility of a happy ending!

Joe Pascoe
Curator Playing Field, August 2010

Photography: all by Screaming Pixel except signage by Kim Brockett 

Published in Craft Culture
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