Tangled Web: an improvised installation for public spaces

An empty public space is transformed by a series of seemingly-randomly placed pegs and poles of different heights positioned in close proximity to each other. A child chooses a ball of thick coloured elastic, and is invited to connect and weave it through the structures. Facilitated by artists and fuelled by music, more and more children add lines to the work, making patterns and stretching the yielding, woven material to create tension, entanglement and an ever-growing and changing web of multi-coloured lines.

Tangled Web is a new interactive play-space installation for children, which uses simple materials in extraordinary ways. Using improvised performance to facilitate the creation of a meaningful, abstract visual arts installation, Tangled Web is unstructured and contains no narrative. Instead, it encourages the free play and artistic expression of children and the involvement of entire families.

Themes and Structure

Through their play and artistic choices, children will create abstract landscapes with the material, imbuing it with political, social and cultural meaning for an audience. They will, by their joyously energetic involvement with the task, express a world that shifts boundaries to encourage inclusion. Imagine the affect that different colours will have on a viewer – the rainbow colours of gay pride, the red, black and yellow of Aboriginal Australia, the greens, blues and browns we associate with the environment. What would be the impact of a purely white landscape? Or one that is all black? And through all this, we will be struck by the constantly moving bodies of children, weaving themselves into the architecture.

Credits

Tangled Web will undergo creative development in December 2009 and throughout 2010, and premiere in 2011.

Key artists: Sue Giles (concept), Ania Reynolds (sound design), Jonothon Oxlade (designer), Michael Baxter (engineer).