HIDE AND SEEK
HIDE AND SEEK- BRAVE NEW WORKS ARTS FESTIVAL #31 - KWOORABUP (DENMARK), Western AustraliA [[DEBUT]]
3 - 21 APRIL 2025
Presented by Denmark Arts Council
Hide and Seek is a playful exploration into how we as individuals and as a society define and assign value to objects. It's about art in unexpected places: art that you go looking for, not art just for looking 'at'.
This ongoing project is, at this moment, best described as a loose, disparate collection of small-scale & miniature mixed-media artworks, predominantly made from a combination of “art waste”, rural detritus and found or second-hand objects (both organic and synthetic in origin). By participating in the project, seekers are invited to reflect upon how context, environment, preservation, humans desire for story and the thrill of finding/seeing/experiencing something unexpected might create or reinforce an object's status as 'special'.
Drawing inspiration from thrifting and antiquing culture, Hide and Seek echoes collective efforts to recover lost values by seeking out qualitative in-person experiences and adopting ‘old ways’ such as repair, restoration and a return to a circular economy; all while reconciling our personal relationships with ‘things’.
In making and presenting these works, I am interested in commenting on contemporary culture’s appetite for “new”, mass-produced, constantly accessible commodities and the recent, now-pervading, binary attitudes toward used, old and ‘waste’ items.
I also hope that, in presenting Hide and Seek, I might gently remind shoppers, treasure-hunters, gallery-hoppers and window-shoppers of the invisible, invaluable artisan hands behind just-about-anything you can hold in your hand.
Seek… and you might find…
WHERE TO LOOK?
Whilst it will take many forms, Hide and Seek's first public iteration was shared with audiences for Brave New Works Community Arts Festival in April 2025. I hid 17 works throughout Denmark township’s northern retail strip and arts precinct within vintage, artisan and antique retailers and heritage-listed buildings.
WHERE CAN YOU PLAY HIDE AND SEEK NEXT ? ...WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW ?
