art
Cats Allowed & Living Landscapes
2009
A one-day urban installation in a housing estate in east London.
The estate is peppered with signs forbidding dogs, ball games, skating, music, etc. and the public space is essentially unused. Together with Space Pilots and group of artists, architects and students, we put together an event that involved games that were not explicitly forbidden. For one of these, a form of charades, I drew a spot light using yellow tape on an old brick wall. I was very pleased when some neighbourhood children came and spontaneously began to play!
Cats Allowed was part of a bigger project developed with Stephanie Brandt that included a series of workshops and public talks around the idea of Living landscapes. In a Japanese government funded workshop I ran at the Nagaoka Institute of Design (NID), I worked with Landscape and Architecture students looking at the invention of games for public spaces as a productive way of exploring the potential or ‘affordances’ of specific spaces leading to more grounded design proposals.
Materials
Yellow gaffer tape, plastic bucket, paper with phrases and words
