The Middle Playground

The research explores how play can be employed as a framework for understanding artistic experience: both in the reception of art and in its creation. The guiding contention is that play (by itself) produces types of exploratory embodied behaviours that are analogous to encountering artworks; the paradigm of play also offers a means to interpret an encounter with an artwork in an open-ended, non-instrumentalised way. The title of the research, The Middle Playground, imagines a concept-space in which these practices occur.