Play: Sarah Rhodes

Play: Sarah Rhodes

Children play, while everything adults do is regarded as more serious, more necessary and more important. This is the manner in which adults compartmentalise the activities of children, it is leisure, it is learning, it is playing around, it is of no great significance when contrasted against what it is that adults do. Sarah Rhodes has sought to interrogate this conflation of children and play in her ongoing series, initiated in 2008. In the absence of adults, is it still possible to consider what children do and how they might work together through the same lens of folly?

Rhodes has charted the same group of children over this period, in each instance photographing them within a forest, void of adults, as they make shelters, fashion tools and weapons, and co-operate within this new order governed by adolescents. Referencing William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, the group appear less as children playing, and more as survivalists creating a new community in a dystopian world. No longer the dependents, these children now appear as the masters of their own destiny, ominously roaming the forest wielding weapons for hunting or protection.

Presented as part of our Emerging Artist Program.

Curator
Claire Monneraye

Exhibition Details
29 August – 18 October 2015