PLAY group show at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba NSW
Let’s Play House was commissioned by the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre and invites us into a world of curiosity, play, and gentle discovery. A free-flowing painted roll of canvas unfurls overhead, forming a cubby house that hovers above us. Across its exterior, silhouettes inspired by the natural environment, plants and animals of the Blue Mountains, hide among abstract, organic forms in deep greens and bright pops of colour, like stumbling upon a Waratah blooming in the bush. Inside, a warm, soft collection of shapes and hues, echoing the comforts and textures of a home, envelops the viewer, gently dissolving the boundaries between indoors and outdoors and welcoming visitors in like a host offering tea and cake.
Visitors are invited to walk through, to sit amongst, to explore. To search, find, and be surprised. The work becomes a space of wonder and delight, a reimagining of what home or safety might mean when shaped by play and imagination rather than walls and permanence.
Beside the canvas sits a second structure of delicate brass mesh. It shimmers with shifting light and shadow, a quiet reminder of the fragility of home and the temporal nature of our worlds. Every touch leaves a trace, a fleeting imprint of presence, an act of ownership and custodianship within this shared, communal space.
Let’s Play House becomes both refuge and revelation: a living, breathing reminder that our homes, like our landscapes, are held together by touch, light, and care.
Photographs are my own
PLAY! examines the facilitative role of art institutions in encouraging play, community connection and self-expression. This exhibition emboldens audiences to follow their curiosity and physically respond to the artworks, generating engagement atypical of institutional settings. In this space, audiences are encouraged to question and explore ideas of self and community through playful, dynamic processes.
By facilitating play-based interaction and creative exploration through the lens of fine art, these spaces have the power to uplift the welfare of the individual and their community. Real-world play acts as a significant tool which audiences can invoke to tackle feelings of isolation and social exclusion, particularly through intergenerational and intercultural exchange with other participants.
PLAY! encourages participants to reap the social benefits of exhibition spaces, reinforcing galleries and institutional grounds as strongholds of community well-being. Featuring: Corrigan Fairbairn, Robert Frost, Melissa Gilbert, Nastia Gladushchenko, Sanné Mestrom, Nadia Odlum, Kate Reid, Andrew Yip.
