Prior to undertaking Master of Arts, Art in Public Space at RMIT, I had been taking my self labelled  ‘Play-scapes’ to community events and festivals all over greater Melbourne. I called them Play-Scapes to indicate their purpose, a miniature landscape or space set aside purely for engaging in acts of play.

From 2015, after leaving a 16 year career in the film and television industry as an on set art and costume technician, I have been developing works that seek to activate public spaces with creative opportunities for play and playful interactions.   Utilising the spaces within a community event or festival- already a space set aside for the purpose of recreation, I install and facilitate the given space as participants engage with the works. These participatory investigations aimed to entice the audience to engage in an unexpected experience.  Initially motivated by the desire to provide a point of connection and a joyful interruption to the everyday the works became an impetus for exploring different actions and motor movements utilised by participants in their exploration of the work.

 RiverScape is one of these play-scapes. It is an intergenerational participatory project aimed at encouraging physical interaction and engagement in a soft sculptural representation of a river. RiverScape is a work that explores human connection to waterways. It invites open ended responses from participants.  It represents a watercourse, a meandering creek, a river’s edge.  Rendered in hyperreal clarity utilising digitally printed fabric rock/cushions and 40 metres of brilliant blue stretch lycra fabric to represents the watercourse, a bright ribbon of flowing fabric sits seemingly impossibly on site.  It is a fantasy landscape. Playful, it offers up a space of imaginative and physical exploration.  Placed in public spaces as a pop- up play space it invites the participants to physically explore the space and find ways to interact with it.  Climbing, balancing, building, stacking, reworking and reinventing the landscape are all actions that take place in this space. 

 I have been installing this work from Gembrook railway station to Pentridge Estate, at Street Festivals and school ovals in the Western suburbs and many places in between. The process begins with me lugging around the huge 40 metre roll of fabric.  Often watched by curious onlookers I undertake the process of unfurling it, and working to the parameters of the site, shape it into a water course. I unpack giant bags filled with the faux river rocks to add to the water course. A vintage fishing basket that once belonged to my dad, filled with hand sewn fabric fish is placed in the space also.  With signage offering up advice on what participants might do in the space, I stand back and observe the engagement that it provoked.

 The MAPS journey has given me space to unpack this project further, to help me understand what motivates me to offer it up and to push the work into new directions, allowing me to investigate alternative readings and explore its value in the spaces it inhabits.