Site Specific-Playgrounds

My concept for this project was to explore lost childhood dreams, when I was a child everyday I would come up with something new that I wanted to do when I grew up, along the years they changed slightly and of course some were lost along the way side . With this project I wanted to explore how to represent those lost dreams as an adult by using some of my own child hood favorite past times, a playground and construction paper. I began what became a series of visits to parks, I went to the parks with no clue what kind of environment I would find. My goal was to let the park guide what I was to make using only construction paper, tape, scissors and string. This was what I came up with, when I arrived a the first site the park was set up as a giant castle. I thought this was a great site since I loved anything that had to do with castles as a child. My basic idea was to
throw tuns of paper airplanes over the castle wall to represent the lost childhood dreams...but as you can see that didn't turn out so well. I ran into the most obvious problem which would happen at a playground...children. I had several children come ask what I was doing, asking if they can help and even asking if I was in high school. At this point I began to get paranoid that some parents would think I was harassing their children so I tried to speed up the process as quickly as possible, because of this I was unable to get a lot of the shots which would have captured the moment well. My original intent was to leave the paper airplanes there so that some other child could pick up my lost dreams and make them their own, but due to the amount of people in the park and the fact that it was patrolled by the police I didn't want to risk it.

Upon my next park venture I decided to take a different approach using the same concept and the same paper airplane idea I created several strings of airplanes to be used within the space. I made small holes on the paper airplanes and ran a string through the planes with a total of 3 strings of air planes. Using the same premise of going to an completely unfamiliar playground I let the environment serve as my guide for the sculpture...

After finding a bridge made out of stairs which said "Game Time" I thought it would be a good site to engage with the paper airplanes. I strung the planes across the bridge as a representation of all of my lost dreams as a child, adolescent and now as an adult, I chose the bridge as away for me to go beyond my dreams and into the unknown. After taking a few photos I wanted to see if there was a way to construct a tunnel using a bed sheet but I wasn't too pleased with the idea so I quickly abandoned it. However I could not leave this playground without incorporating the main focal point when you walk to the park. In the front of the park was a broken pelican , it was the kind of pelican which you ride and it wobbles as you rock but apparently someone rocked too hard on it, and it looked like it was about to fall over. What I found most intriguing about it was the fact that instead of removing the broken pelican they decided to leave it there and wrap it in police caution tape. While at the park I watched several children approach the playground and sure enough all of them were drawn to the pelican to see what was wrong with it, which of course I did the same thing when I entered. After seeing this reaction from people I had to interact with it.. the broken pelican serves as a way to affirm the lost dreams with a broken childhood playground there is no going back to it only moving forward with new dreams.