Curated by Emma Gregory

Artist Emma Gregory on the why and how of working with a playful mindset.

This curated selection is accompanied by an exhibition essay on play and the artist, structured in two sections:

• What is a playful mindset and why we need it, along with Axis artists who invite their audiences to play or specialise in playful co-creation in a community workshop setting. 
   
• And… Tips for entering a playful mindset (rules, rituals and prompts) and what Axis Pro Members’ have to say about being playful and the importance of play. 

Read the exhibition essay here

PlayLAB is an immersive interactive installation that explores the notion of a shared, playful experience, commissioned and originally exhibited at LEVEL Centre, Rowsley. It looked at the different ways we play and what creativity means to individuals and groups through objects of play, made with participants and audiences. Objects made as part of the creation process we exhibited in physical, digital and play form. Celebrating the participant as artist and allowing audiences to play with the artworks made.

The original exhibition experience allowed audiences to creatively play both in the physical and digital world! Filling the room with 3D digital shapes and play with digital toys, in a laboratory setting. Audiences interact with the digital artwork using toys that played a part in the creative process. Bubble blowers, paint guns and Nerf gun style toys provide interaction with the digital lab and explores messiness and destruction as mechanisms of play. By destroying the lab through play, audiences are left with an invitation to explore the outside world as their next place of play, which led to the follow up work PlayLAND. /

The work explores an artistic journey that brings co-created community made artwork to gallery audiences through high quality digital experiences.

John Whall

On Balance is a kinetic sculpture made for the group exhibition SET LIST at Centrespace in Bristol in the autumn of 2025. Although it’s made from a repurposed toy - a children’s seesaw - and I had a lot of fun making it, I was really surprised how much people enjoyed ‘playing’ with the sculpture at the preview event and during the rest of the exhibition. Placed right inside the gallery door, it gave visitors an immediate starting point and opportunity to become haptically involved with the artwork - and play!

Helen Grant

I am a painter, who also makes puppets and other works from recycled materials, namely; wood, old fabrics and papier mache. I use these objects for small installations, as props or prompts for paintings, photographic tableaux or simply as works in their own right. I started making puppets and masks so that I could make the images in some of my paintings more concrete. The works often play with aspects of scale and there is a general lack of functionality, making them unsuitable for traditional puppet show performance. Instead, by playfully placing these figures in different scenarios, I’m able to create curious worlds, reflecting internal states.

Caroline Watson

With some soul searching as to what to give my young grandson for Christmas 2025, I made a Minecraft inspired figure, repurposing everyday materials and wishing to “buck-the-trend” of ‘tech’ devices given for a physical object to play with. This created a sense of Deja vu from my own childhood memories and was a joy to engage with and to handle in a mindful way. The physical reality of the work engrossing and uplifting in this age of all-encompassing tech, noting that play can afford joy and development at any age. Following on from this, I made a model for a modernist pavilion from discarded card from cereal boxes with play again in mind. 

Robert McCubbin

I have been collaborating with a group of artists, over the last 2 years to develop ways for audiences to playfully interact with my audiovisual timeline installation “Murmurations” through the use of “Conduit Masks”. Whether designed and made from recycled materials by workshop participants or ready-made from predesigned and printed templates, the masks offer a way to joyfully connect with other than human beings, perhaps to spirit animals, exploring ideas of authentic self and potential characteristics to embody through play and disguise. They create space to consider how we better communicate our authentic self with each other, find a way back to ourselves, or see through different eyes. They can permit an exchange of experiences unique to the individual that would otherwise be missed, left unvocalised, not shared.

Murmurations (animated film installation) will ask the audience to look again at history and cultural heritage from different perspectives and the masks, provide a lightness and magical otherworldliness where we can consider new ideas and new ways of approaching how we reflect back and then project positive futures.

Jill Impey

In play, I’m the “director” allowing change to narratives, experiment with solutions, and regain a sense of agency over past events.

Flisan Beard

110 cut outs.

Photographs from a life lived. Ongoing, random, strange and made stranger again.

Lying with each other, hesitant to start but full of words. They wait for me and like children with hands outstretched they say:

“We are ready!
Come wiggle your toes with us.
Let us show you what we can know together.
Let us remix and remake the stories of your self."

Kuch Bhogal

Stepping on, stepping up, stepping between …these actions lead us from an unconscious and everyday moment that gets lost amongst many others, towards a conscious sense of playful engagement with the environment; in larking around, an everyday moment and an inconspicuous person is suddenly catapulted into an imaginary game.

Sharon Haward

My current work explores Whitby jet as a drawing material. Instead of carving or polishing it as in traditional usage, I approach the material through small acts of testing and play.

Fragments of jet are sometimes ground into dust and washed across paper. The first image shows a detail from the work Tide, a series of drawings made by letting jet powder settle into wet surfaces.

I have also been drawing directly with the raw fragments themselves. The second image shows a small piece of jet held in my hand while I work  on a large drawing in the background. Rather than using a conventional drawing tool, jet itself becomes the instrument.

Working in this way means allowing the material to lead. Each fragment behaves slightly differently, leaving darker or lighter traces. Play becomes a way of learning how jet can move between object, dust, and drawing. 

Hondartza Fraga

The art breaks out when the thinking stops and my being becomes doing.

When I’m on a roll every piece is a surprise, I like to be lost - I binned ‘narratives’ and ‘concepts’ years ago.

If I catch myself second guessing in the studio - alarms sound - STOP! - do something functional or tidy up and go home.

Cutting, chopping, sticking with unsentimental freedom, giving priority to joy, play and letting the artwork reveal itself.

Master material so it doesn’t get in your way, paying attention to the phenomena and being in the moment.

Nurture the forms, exploit frictions, animate space.

Physis

Sculpture

Plasma cut and welded steel plate, enamel, soot & spatter.

March 2026

Work in progress - nearly done - one more burst.

Andrew Revell