Projects, Outputs and Events

AAANZ Conference

Dr Sanné Mestrom and Nadia Odlum presented in the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand annual conference, as part of the panel ‘Coaxing chaos: spontaneous demonstrations in contemporary art.’

‘Unconscious Demonstrations of Freedom: Children’s Behaviour in Public Places’ can be viewed here.

ABSTRACT: Public spaces in cities influence and shape how we inhabit and move through them. Michel Foucault characterises modernity through a distribution of power, agency and gazes. Public spaces as panoptic regimes of visibility and order can be understood as reinforcing power and domination through their linear spatial organisation, but they can also offer potential sites of resistance and subversion. My research addresses how young children relate to public spaces in cities. Through play, they inhabit and unconsciously subvert the powerful exertions of the public realm in ways that we, as adults, find difficult to anticipate. Quentin Stevens suggests that most movements children make are spontaneous demonstrations of freedom and imagination. Trying to understand how public spaces shape us, by analysing them through the eyes of a child, may give us the tools to ‘fight back’ against the power these spaces exert over us. Drawing on extensive observation of behaviours in public spaces, my research findings suggest that even the most innocuous doorway or gutter can be a site for play, resistance and power. Indeed, my own art practice (public sculpture) explores the way we can embed these unpredictable child-led demonstrations into ways of thinking about public space.

Article: The Conversation

This new ‘risky’ playground is a work of art – and a place for kids to escape their mollycoddling parents
Discussing the history of playable sculpture alongside the innovative new work by Mike Hewson.
Published: November 9, 2022
Dr. Sanné Mestrom
Image credit: Mike Hewson

Interview: The Herald Sun

Artist-designed playgrounds key to teaching kids how to take risks
Sydney University senior lecturer and artists Dr Sanne Mestrom has found “simple but radical” installations could help build confidence and resilience in kids and bring out an adult’s inner sense of wonder and curiosity.

Published December 6, 2022
Interview with Dr. Sanné Mestrom, by Joanne Tran

Image credit: Sheeda Chen and son Felix, 3, playing at Mike Hewson’s playground sculpture in Simpson Park St Peters. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Radio Interview: 2SER 107.3

Risky Playgrounds
Published: 24th of November, 2022
Interview with Dr. Sanné Mestrom, by Danny Chifley

Image credit: Mike Hewson

Article: The University of Sydney

Sanne Mestrom's sculptures invite play
The Art Gallery of New South Wales has acquired a work by Dr Sanné Mestrom, from Sydney College of the Arts, which repositions sculpture as art for play. The Offering will be exhibited in one of the Sculpture Garden of the museum’s new building.

Published: November 8, 2022
By Sally Quinn

The Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship

Nadia Odlum was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship SCA Travel grant to undertake field research in the USA.

From October to November 2022 Odlum travelled to New York, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh, researching playable sculpture and connecting with US-based artists and academics.

Performing the City Symposium

Online symposium Friday, 7 August 2020.

Presented by Sanné Mestrom, University of Sydney

This one-day symposium explored the current—and changing—role of creative disciplines in bringing urban communities together, driving conversations, and nurturing senses of place. Through a combination of presentations, provocations and a workshop, the program reflected on the growing interest in presenting art outside of the gallery/museum context, examining the opportunities and implications of complex interdisciplinary relationships between art, landscape architecture, urban planning and the social sciences, as they redefine the role of public art in the move towards people-centred place-making. With backgrounds ranging from digital design to sculpture, urban planning, and performance studies, presenters explored how sharing creative and innovative research in the arts can contribute to learning, civic debate, placemaking and community engagement.

Keynote

Dr. Quentin Stevens, RMIT University,  Architecture and Urban
Design Urban play: a dialogue between people and environments

Respondents

Dr. Sanné Mestrom | Urban Art, Play and Risk
Dr. Luke Hespanhol | Online and Blended Public Spaces
Dr. Ian Maxwell | Affordances, habits, practices and rituals: towards thinking about performance,  performativity, and performing the city

For more information on this project, click here.

Snakes and Ladders

Snakes and Ladders is a collaborative public art project between Sydney artists Digby Webster and Nadia Odlum. This fifty-metre-long ground plane mural creates an accessible play space in the Western Sydney suburb of Sydney Olympic Park. Inspired by the classic game ‘Snakes and Ladders’ the artwork can be used as a life-size game board. Visitors can access a digital dice via the project signage, as well as accessible elements such as an audio description.

This project was commissioned Sydney Olympic Parks Authority and supported by Accessible Arts.

This artwork was included as a case study in the Journal of Public Space special issue ‘Universally Accessible Public Spaces for All’. To read this article click here.

For more information on this project, including a ‘making of’ video, click here.

Ludic Folly 

Ludic Folly is a child-led pilot study in public art, where children “build” their own sculptural play environments. Through a child-led approach, the Ludic Folly pilot project seeks to address a larger research concern: What permanent infrastructure can we integrate into the built environment to make our cities more child-friendly? In the interest of co-creating urban design responses with our children and ensuring we provide them with the playable environments they actually want, Ludic Folly is designed to test creative assumptions about the sorts of public art and/or sculpture children might be drawn to. It enables a detailed analysis of their play-behaviors, including: self-imposed boundaries of risk, creativity, challenge and comfort.

The first iteration of this study was conducted in the Blue Mountains, on Gundungarra and Darug Country. It was led by Dr Sanné Mestrom.

For more information, click here.

Body As Verb

In Body As Verb, Sanné Mestrom looks at sculpture through a child’s eyes – recreating her 20th-century iconic modernist sculptures to invite physical engagement. These sculptures are an exploration of the types of works that might make public spaces “less threatening, and more curious, dynamic and alive.” While each individual object is autonomous, the sculptural series can be reconfigured in countless arrangements - prostrate, outstretched or squatting structures all offer up sturdy support for smaller components or real bodies in the space.

For more information, click here.

Roll

Roll is a reconfigurable, interactive artwork created by Nadia Odlum. Featuring colourful recycled pipes and plastic balls, Roll can be constructed anywhere there is a grassy hill. Audiences are invited to harness gravity and creativity to play together in public space.

This artwork was first presented in Sydney Olympic Park, in Western Sydney. Since then it has travelled to HOTA (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast in Queensland, where it delighted audiences in the expansive grassy grounds. In June 2022 Roll was installed at Boronia Grove in Epping, for the project ‘Stepping through Epping’, commissioned by the City of Parramatta Council.

In it’s first iteration Roll was assembled by Odlum. In each subsequent iteration it is constructed through play by other artists, in response to an open instruction set.

For more information on this project, including a ‘making of’ video, click here.

Columns des Burwood

Commissioned by Burwood Council as part of the Streets as Shared Spaces program, this artwork by Nadia Odlum invites audiences to play, move, and navigate their way through an urban street.

Columns des Burwood artwork draws inspiration from renowned French contemporary artist Daniel Buren’s ‘Le Deux Plateux’ (1986). Colloquially referred to as ‘Colonnes des Buren’, the work consists of 260 marble columns laid out in a perfect grid at different heights, which encourages physical interaction between artwork and audience.

Nadia Odlum’s playful homage echoes Buren’s ideas around spatial awareness and perception, but with new joyous energy that reflects the vibrancy of Burwood.

For more information, click here.

Article: The Conversation

How to get the most out of sand play: 4 tips from a sculptor

Published: December 30, 2022 

Dr. Sanné Mestrom reflects on the potential of sand play for child development.

Interview: ABC Radio

Sanné Mestrom talks about sand play with Cameron Marshall on ABC Breakfast Radio.

listen here