The Playce Between

A Delightful Divergence for Design Week 

Written By: Tosten Geelan

Amidst the myriad of exhibitions, seminars, and celebrations taking place during this years’ Copenhagen Design Week, ‘The PLAyCE BETWEEN’ showcases the prototypes for a utopian adolescence by Will Gurley and the mesmerizing surface explorations of Pernille Snedker Hansen. Gurley is an American artist and designer from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, whose newest collection consists of furniture and architectural features with interactive elements that encourage the creative participation and play of children. His work is based upon the observation that children spend most of their life in the home. “In essence, it’s a new look at how we interact with our homes and what purposes we bring into our own surroundings, because we all benefit from play and story creation,” he says.

Much of his inspiration stems from the wisdom of Maria Monisory, an Italian educational philosopher of the early 20^th century who amongst other things created small, child-sized furniture and environments which helped foster their intellectual development by producing self-educating children’s worlds. With a fine arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design in the US, as well a Masters of Industrial Design from Central Saint Martins in the UK, Gurley has been able to raise awareness and sensitivity about the value of play in the everyday, transforming commonplace objects and architectural features into creative opportunities and playful learning tools for children and homeowners alike.

In this way the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the banal meaningful and magical. A red door is transformed into a theatre, the surrounding wall adorned with a castle, integrating play and narrative creation opportunities into domestic interiors and architectural ornamentation. In his Coffee Table Express, a model train runs along a track with a camera mounted on it, allowing one to slide self-drawn pictures into the table top, creating an animated series of images displayed on a television screen nearby.

Accompanying Gurley’s work are aesthetically astounding marbled prints and surface designs by Pernille Snedker Hansen. A designer whose art spans a variety of working practices and design processes, Hansen was trained as a Textiles Designer at Design School Kolding, before embarking upon a Masters in Creative Practices for Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, where the symbiotic relationship of these two artists first blossomed. Hansen’s most recent creation uses the less controllable medium of marbling to create expressive compositions on paper and wood.  Inspired by the Japanese paper marbling tradition, her work is akin to the haiku and thus in a sense is pictorial poetry.

 For Hansen, “marbling is a more intuitive, immediate and spontaneous way of working.” Through this practice she has been able to capture elegant compositions with immense details in a hypnotically beautiful color palette. Each piece embodies one moment of color because the material itself is spontaneous. Hansen sates that “the process is the purpose,’ her marbling’s capture one moment, a freeze frame, and explore the joy of color and intimate detail.

Designed to inspire the imagination, ‘The Kids Play Date’ this Sunday is the perfect opportunity to bring your kid to see the exhibition and interact with the works, create puppets and perform a show, as well as experimenting with the possibilities of arts and crafts in the home while enjoying homemade chocolate-chip cookies and milk.  Everyone knows it breaks a parent’s heart to see uninspired, inactive children wasting the hours away at home, so break the norm and the mold, and come see how the home can provide a stimulating environment for our children, and hence provide a brighter future for our society.

Gurley and Hansen created their work at the Danish National Workshops for the Arts and Crafts, where their semiotic talent was given free reign to unfurl. The exhibition takes place in the non-profit art space 2012, located in Copenhagen’s meat packing district, Kødbyen. The space promotes experimentation and boundary breaking creativity, and always provides a breath of fresh air.