After three successful hands-on exhibitions, Playeum’s Children’s Centre for Creativity is launching its fourth interactive exhibition ‘Making It Home: Dreaming Rooms, Making Spaces, Creating Places’ at arts cluster Gillman Barracks from now to 29th October.
‘Making It Home’ is designed for children ages 1-12 and celebrates the home as a source of creativity, artistry and thinking. The spaces within the Children’s Centre for Creativity will be transformed into different ‘rooms’, each with a different purpose and opportunities to explore, experiment and redefine. Led by Creative Director and Pedagogical Advisor Esther Joosa, the exhibition is inspired by children’s ideas of the home. It allows children and parents to experience the home as a place where many ordinary materials can have multiple purposes and support imagination, innovation and sustainability. Children visiting in school groups and with their families can enjoy an extravaganza of activities, arranged in the different ‘rooms’ of the home they are exploring:
The Central Space – Creating Connections: How many children consider the pipes that have the important job of carrying water into and away from the home? This creative installation offers children the chance to encounter the versatility of PVC drain pipes and bring their personal ideas to make infinite installations which can create connections.
The Bedroom – Dreams & Drama: The bedroom has for a long time been a space and hideaway in which dreams and emotions are acted out. Inspired by dreams of their own, children will get to use textiles and more to transform themselves and engage in make-believe play.
The Future Living Room: Known as a communal space where multiple generations come together at home, talking and relaxing, the ‘Future Living Room’ invites children to think and play with movable cubes. They can also explore upholstery with textiles and build with different blocks to show their own ideas of how a ‘chair of the future’ could look.
The Store-y Room: The store room is known to be a dark, slightly scary space that stores odd and sometimes discarded items. In ‘Making It Home’, the store room is transformed into a ‘story room’, with shadows and colours that use technology to make everyday objects come to life for story-making.
The Laundry Room – Agile Textiles: The laundry room is a space where different types of textiles are gathered at home, and at ‘Making It Home’, it is no different. Children can explore the world of laundry and cloth through weaving and peg-play. They can watch their textile creations flow as they are hung from a laundry pole. Unlike at home, the children can safely play with the spinning fans to enjoy a kaleidoscopic effect.
The Kitchen – Cooking Up Ideas: The kitchen is a space for touch, smell and experimentation! Children will use a variety of materials such as magnets, sand, and kitchen instruments to engage and focus on sensory play. Their explorations can also include the real herbs growing just outside the Children’s Centre for Creativity.
The Thinker’s Room: This interactive space allows children to share more about their ideas and creations in a purpose-built space, enabling them to document through photography and video.
The Play Making Space – Pulling Up Ideas: Surrounded by quirky pulleys and a range of resources, children can explore and express their thoughts through tinkering and constructing creations with reusable materials, upcycling them to create something new for their own home.
Growing Space: Although Singapore is small and densely populated, it is a garden city. Playeum’s geodesic dome will be transformed into a multi-layered garden that provides shade and food. The garden will grow local and western herbs and solar powered lights will light up the dome at night.
Creative Director and Pedagogical Advisor Dr. Esther Joosa explained the philosophy that lies behind the hands-on exhibition: “‘Making It Home’ is not just a literal space; it also introduces children to the power of imagination in learning and the notion that creativity starts from home. Children inspire us and we hope that children will leave, themselves inspired, to continue their journey of making and creating within their domestic environment, repurposing used or broken household items and building dreams for a future.
By using regular household items and transforming them into multi-purpose objects, children develop themselves as divergent and creative thinkers which forms positive attitudes to critical thinking, adaptive skills and autonomy. These are vital skills and attributes for children to develop holistically in this fast-changing world. We also want to communicate the importance of re-using existing materials. There is so much waste in our lives, and the need to integrate sustainability in our every-day thinking has never been so great. It can be hugely enjoyable and develops children’s sense of ownership, artistry and creativity as well.”
Playeum’s Children’s Centre for Creativity
47 Malan Road, #01-23
Gillman Barracks , Singapore 109444
