all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway
One aspect of play is the miniaturisation of the world: everything becomes small: the ditch is a river, lead soldiers are an army, the rock in the woods is a mountain. Bits of shrapnel (a bomb), medals and buttons (a soldier), model aircraft (planes exploding overhead and destroying your house) become synecdoches of the disturbance of war at the scale of a child’s hand — controllable, collectible, evidence that one is alive. So too the drawings here, amplified or diminished by the verses and commentary. That which is traumatic is neutralised by being made small while at the same time being part of something as enormous as a war. The Right to Play movement which is about child labour, might in what appears so far to be a war-torn twenty-first century, go hand in hand with being allowed to play, allowed to process what is happening by translating it into artefacts, collections, games with arcane rules, drawings and stories: a kind of material resistance. A survivalist response. £
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on site review 44 : play ©
Mistaya Hemingway
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