Playful

Somewhere in this festival, there’s a pile of giant foam shapes. That’s Playshapes. Designed by artist Pippa Hale, and brought here by us (in a great big van).

We’re Playful: a circus performer, a strategist, a designer and a few others who never quite agreed on what they wanted to be when they grew up but all ended up here, convinced that play matters, for everyone, and that most spaces don’t have nearly enough of it. We work with cultural venues, organisations and public spaces to change that. We Harness the power of play. The artists make the work. We bring it to life.

Playshapes began at the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art in Gateshead in 2019. Since then, it’s been to a number of venues and locations and currently forms part of a permanent installation at WonderLab at the National Railway Museum in York.

It’s is a series of polyethylene foam cubes (900m cubed) that break down into different shapes from triangles, polygons, cylinders and rectangular prisms. They can be refigured into limitless combinations to create sculpture, dens, assault courses, playscapes or chill out spaces.

Where did the idea come from? Pippa made the artwork in response to her experiences as a parent of young children and a growing frustration with fixed play equipment in soft play centres and outdoor playgrounds that limited play opportunities and the imaginations and agency of kids to create their own playful environments.

Play is important because it’s a basic human driver, like eating or sleeping. It’s how we learn, how we develop hand-to-eye co-ordination and confidence, how we hone our gross motor skills and our social skills, and it’s how we learn to take risks and build resilience. Play is open-ended, experimental, adaptable, fluid, sociable and fun.

However, since 2015 play has massively dropped off our agendas as we moved away from a play-based childhood. Our attention has been hijacked by tech companies and our creativity drained out of us by an outdated education system that no longer prepares us for contemporary life. If human-kind is to survive and thrive in this world of rapid change and technological advancement, we need to take back control of our creative lives, reawaken our inner child and have some fun!

Playshapes is an opportunity for people of all ages to come together to play together.