{"id":220310,"date":"2023-03-04T14:57:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T05:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/?p=220310"},"modified":"2023-03-04T14:57:45","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T06:34:33","slug":"mike-hewson-sculptural-wheeled-playground-encourages-risky-play-within-a-secured-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/design\/mike-hewson-sculptural-wheeled-playground-encourages-risky-play-within-a-secured-world\/","title":{"rendered":"MIKE HEWSON SCULPTURAL WHEELED PLAYGROUND ENCOURAGES RISKY PLAY WITHIN A SECURED WORLD"},"content":{"rendered":"

The dangers of thinking safe by Mike Hewson<\/h3>\r\n
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Embracing risk is really just part of embracing life.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

That\u2019s why it is important to encourage exploratory and risk-taking behavior in an everyday public setting. We can\u2019t put handrails around everything and even if we could I don\u2019t think it would really benefit us.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

I<\/span> came across these words belonging to Mike Hewson, which he has spoken during the TEDxSidney talk Playing with risk: The dangers of thinking safe, in August 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Rocks On Wheels, Mike Hewson, 2022 88 Southbank Boulevard, Melbourne, Australia.
\r\nAll photos and credits to Mike Hewson<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

My eyes watered during the speech, just when he explained the roots of his work and the vulnerability, impermanence, and volatility he uses as grounds for his concepts.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Mike Hewson is the New Zealand installation artist who has designed the public playground\u00a0Rocks On Wheels\u00a0in Southbank, Melbourne.<\/p>\r\n

The sculpture park consists of 24 monolithic bluestone boulders placed on what appear to be furniture dollies, making the park a place for kids to experiment space.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\u201cWhat are we losing if we potentially blindly focus on reducing risk?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Mike Hewson, TEDxSydney, 2022<\/em><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n

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Forniture dollies contribute to keep alive the \u201cactive\u201d aspect of the installation<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

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At a first glance, everyone might be stung by such a risky approach, especially when it comes to children. But that\u2019s exactly the point.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

In this regard, during the TEDx in Sydney, the artist retrace his career: he is a visual artist with a background in structural engineering and heavy civil construction.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

The stage of his first work was the dangerous and unpredictable Ocean, which theoretically collided with risk reduction practice and permanent-oriented constructions he projected as a structural engineer, at that time. \u201cYou can escape risks but you can\u2019t escape danger\u201d, says Hewson remarking on the vulnerability of things during his journeys in the open seas.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Fixed points fell definitively apart when an earthquake stroke in Christchurch and the stable city he was living in suddenly became like the wild Ocean, dangerous and unpredictable, while everything become temporary and vulnerable.<\/p>\r\n

The sensation of the possibility of things<\/i> in rapid change took his inspiration to another level. \u201cNow I make artworks, in public places. Large, permanent, usually climbable things in unsupervised places filled with children, parents, teenagers where everything could go wrong\u201d, jokes Hewson talking about his works.<\/p>\r\n

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Nature is a pillar, such as the intersection of the final artifact with it. The \u201ccasual\u201d order of things retraces the organic power of the spaces outside the city order.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThe assumption of the 21st century is that everything should be on one track, we should be safer, ordered, predictable and efficient\u201d, says Hewson talking about people getting concerned or surprised by his works.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

His playgrounds deliberately want to depict the most valuable experience for children, who discover limits in a little society, the one they build with their friends\u00a0 within a no-patterned environment. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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In this sculpture park of fences, Mike Hewson has turned sculptures into play equipment. The fences\u2019 ruins were \u201crescued\u201d using Street View to scroll through years, after the government's decision to tear down some of the houses in the community for construction purposes. Each fence was remade as an exact replica.<\/p><\/div>

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ST PETERS FENCES, 2020, Mike Hewson<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

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\u201cBut that\u2019s not the reality we live in! So why do we try and like live as if it\u2019s always going to be good? How can we ensure the kids live adventures, or be prepared in life or ourselves when we get thrown up on the high seas?\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Mike Hewson, TEDxSydney, 2022<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

In his work with playgrounds, he is keenly interested in observing how kids want to interact with things, like climbing, understands dangers, explore\u00a0real\u00a0risks, and learn how to keep themselves safe.<\/p>\r\n

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For the children, everything is potentially a playground (Hewson often incorporates old trees and organic objects into the landscape) and the designer is called to mirror users\u2019 needs and enhance human instincts as well as behaviors.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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By eliminating risks, the cities eliminate the research and the self-awareness in favor of a standardized message. Reality becomes an artifact and people become weaker.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

His award-winning projects lay a new foundation for merging conceptual art projects into the public realm by proving that things that are considered untenable in a public setting can be achieved.<\/p>\r\n

With Hewson, the playground regains its architectural signification as well as an investigative function where it is placed.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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As reported in the article I wrote for ADF Caring the city, caring the children: M. Paul Friedberg\u2019s inspired handcraft playgrounds for a post-covid Kokomo No Kuni<\/i><\/span><\/a>, until the 1980s, architects and designers focused on risky projects around city parks.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

The playground represented a laboratory, a discovery center and a new focal point for the city, around which both designers and users could express themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

From the 1900s, with the emerging child psychology, the parks were transformed from mere functional places equipped with steel pipes and gymnastic equipment into creative design experiments: by modifying the concept linked to the fun of the child while transforming the playgrounds into a canvas for the architects, designers, urban planners for bringing out social experiments in the cities.<\/p>\r\n

Van Eyck transformed the city of Amsterdam which was destroyed by the war into a dreamlike place, Mitsuru Senda exacerbated the tragedy of the bombing with colors, M. Paul Friedberg wrote and published\u00a0Handcrafted Playgrounds - Design You Can Build Yourself<\/i>\u00a0to give the tools to the community for joining a joyful experience in building a different future and environments developed for children by the children.<\/p>\r\n

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Hewson returns to the argument in order to avoid standard environments and empower city management as the child\u2019s role.<\/p>\r\n

Each project aims to catalyze a fresh conversation about how the bureaucratic and managerial aspects of power are shaping our public lives, asking if we like that shape or if we\u2019d like to consider other options.<\/p><\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The dangers of thinking safe by Mike Hewson Embracing risk is really just part of embracing life.\u00a0 That\u2019s why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":220298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\"MIKE HEWSON SCULPTURAL WHEELED PLAYGROUND ENCOURAGES RISKY PLAY WITHIN A SECURED WORLD\" #MikeHewson #adf #npoadf","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8],"tags":[38,96,108,388],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/adf-web-magazine-mike-hewson-1.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adfwebmagazine.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}