Nowadays, when I go to an art gallery, it’s usually to play. One big reason for this is that I have two small children: pretty much the only things they do when they’re awake are play, eat, and, if not playing or eating, complain. Another reason is that I live near the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, which almost invariably has a ‘play exhibition’ on its ground floor. Play exhibitions are great, because whereas typically art galleries are obliged to discourage guests from doing things like touching the art, throwing the art, kicking the art, licking the art, running around at speed near the art — all of which a young child in an art gallery, or indeed a tall, full-bodied man in his mid-30s in an art gallery, will very naturally want to do — in a play exhibition, the touching, throwing, kicking, and licking etc. in many ways is the art itself. It is in being played with that the objects in a play exhibition are constituted asart. 

As anexample, one might consider‘Leap Then Look’, which ran from October 2024 until June this year. The exhibition filled the gallery with a number of objects — small wooden sculptures, interlocking irregular wooden jigsaw bits, and long plastic tubes — which visitors could interact with in a number of ways: they coulduse the jigsaw bits to make a sculpture, for instance, or construct a ‘telephone’ system with the tubes. Often (but not always) the ‘play’ aspects of a play exhibition will be related to some broader point or theme, which will be related to visitors through (for instance) text: thus Albert Potrony’sEqual Play, which ran at BALTIC for a year from September 2021, used its objects to ‘explore themes of non-gendered and non-prescriptive play.’ Meanwhile, the gallery’s current play exhibition, Harold Offeh’s‘The Mothership Collective 2.0’, attempts to communicate utopian possibilities inspired by Afrofuturism through the medium of synthesisers, thumb pianos, and inflatable plastic balls.

I love play exhibitions, and almost always have fun taking my kids to them. Certainly, from a theoretical perspective, I think they’re great. I’ve always despised Kant’s notion that our experience of beauty is supposed to be ‘disinterested’; I have always rather cleaved to Eddie Argos’s implicit rejoinder that art both can, and should, make us ‘want to rock out.’ But, if I have a criticism, I think your average play exhibition is more effective in fulfilling what we might call a civic function than it is any sort of specifically aesthetic one. In somewhere like BALTIC (which does not charge an entry fee), the play exhibition functions as a sort of free indoor playground: somewhere to take one’s children on a rainy day. Effectively, it is a public soft play.

This is all good — it rarely feels like there are enough free, indoor things to bring children to, and I’m glad that curators have stumbled on this one weird trick to make the Art Council fund them. But, ultimately, I’m a bit sceptical that any child (or anyone) has a more profound aesthetic experience in these places than they might have in, say, a common or garden soft play. Typically, the themes the artist wants, in their well-meaning way, to use the play to explore, are at best epiphenomenal to how children might be induced to play with them, which, over time, on repeat visits, tend to become fairly proscribed (the same basic sculpture getting built with the same basic stuff, for example) — while as a spur to the imagination I’m far from convinced they do all that much more for a kid than a ball pit, or a big slide. Kids don’t really need art in order to imagine things: my daughter (aged 3) can’t even pass a derelict phone box without wanting to use it to make-believe a shop. 

With this in mind, ‘Pet Project’, a work by theestablished creator of play exhibitions, Pippa Hales — currently on at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle from now until March next year — constitutes a major achievement in the field of play aesthetics. ‘Pet Project’ consists of a room on the first floor of the museum — itself a wonderfully singular space, a French-style palais on the outskirts of a relatively isolated market town near Darlington, purpose-built to show off the art collection ofthe illegitimate scion of an aristocratic dynasty grown super-rich through coal — which has been filled with around 30 ‘squishees’: effectively big, well-stuffed bean bags just taller in height than an adult man, and with the same rough shape as an Easter Island head. Said squishees have been modelled after a cat and dog found in the museum’s ceramics collection. These pieces sit, alongside other ceramic animals from the collection, as well as a number of items sourced from the local public, in glass cases adjacent to, but sensibly just about separate enough from, the squishees. 

The squishees are wonderfully tactile, and highly non-prescriptive in their uses. What makes them especially good for playing with is that they are quite difficult for any child to handle. Whereas in a typical play exhibition, the objects are ones that any child can pick up and manipulate quite readily (hence leading, I think, to the same patterns being repeated over and over again), the squishees are heavy and, though soft, unyielding If you want to find a way of moving them intentionally, you’re going to have to work together. Beyond this, however, as one clambers over them, the squishees form a sort of mass: rubbing against one another, they are coagulating into new configurations all the time. Stacked on top of each other, they become mountains: in theory, one could stack three or four together and reach right up to the ceiling. Underneath, the squishees form tunnels. Children throw themselves into them and scurry; they become enveloped. More than anything else, perhaps, the squishees form a sort of landscape: by the end of our visit, my son (6) had come up with a relatively detailed map of the fantasy land he had projected onto them (here’s the forest, here’s the caves, here’s the snow…). Many play exhibitions provide children with rudimentary objects they can use to, say, build things resembling play equipment. But the squishees are much more alien than that: less an abstraction from objects a child might ordinarily encounter, than a surreal elaboration of a couple of ornaments in a style they are most likely to be familiar with from their grandparents’ house. 

The surreal qualities of the squishees are emphasised by the fact that, aside from a single cat and a single dog, which have been painted by Hale, almost all of them are blank and white beanbag canvases. Yet this will change, as visitors and the general public will have a chance to paint them themselves. When we visited, my children were both able to make their own contributions to one of the cats (the word ‘DADDY’ and some dots from my daughter; a list of gases commonly found in the earth’s atmosphere from my son); in the months to come, other squishees will be painted by local school and community groups. Thus, in Pet Project, there is an emphasis not only on visitors turning the objects into art objects by playing with them, but also on the public helping to beautify these objects themselves. Moreover, this enhances the ‘playfulness’ of the piece insofar as it renders it constitutively dynamic. This sense of the project as a space for artistic practice andaesthetic exploration is enhanced by the inclusion of a workshop space next to the ceramics gallery. On the day we visited, we were all able to paint and take home a cat or dog statue ourselves. 

The Bowes Museum, as I’ve said, was founded by a very rich man (and his wife) who owed his wealth to his inheritance. But there remains a certain utopianism to it: the childless John Bowes, always something of an outsider to the British class system as a result of his illegitimacy, and his French wife Josephine, who fancied herself as a painter, did not build their collection in order to keep it in the family, but rather to give it to the public. In relation to the space, ‘Pet Project’ helps to inculcate a sense of the museum as something that might potentially belong to anyone. In a way, my only wish is that it were more expansive: that instead of 30-odd squishees confined to a single room, it consisted of hundreds of squishees, spread out over the entire building. The public might only truly own their art galleries once their conversion into playgrounds has become complete.