Kayt Hughes’s recent solo exhibition at Gallery North ‘My Five-Year-Old Could Have Done That’ suggests that out of play, great and even profound ideas may emerge.
Outside of the arts, the concept of play is associated almost exclusively with children and even they must confine it to a designated ‘playground’. Later, play is one of the first big ideas you learn in art school; dredged from their small ponds and delivered into a sea of equal and mostly greater talents than theirs, first year students are advised to ignore their debilitating levels of self-awareness, stretch up a canvas, hire a camera, loosen up, and PLAY.
Hughes is eighteen months out of university and appears, hearteningly, to be still playing. Indeed, her exploration of play is so considered that she has structured her nascent art practise around it. Her objects, formed from wood, rope, and plasticene, have a buff aesthetic – they are screaming out to be played with. Alas, in this exhibition at least, the works are completed via instructions carried out by gallery staff. Play it may be, but this is studied and sensitive work.
Your five-year-old (and I know, because I have one) is capable of beauty and of eliciting emotions that could move mountains, but a contemporary artist they are not.
