A Game Played in the Gallery Over Two Days

Preview: Wednesday 2 August / 3-5pm / All welcome, a family-friendly event

MK Gallery Project Space
Opening Hours
Thursday & Friday: 12pm–8pm
Saturday: 11am–8pm
Admission free

A Game Played in the Gallery Over Two Days is an exhibition made by children using things gathered by adults – a public expression of a game played for personal enjoyment. The game is driven by an improvised narrative as the children incorporate successive objects into their play. This process can be flowing, fraught and funny, absorbing the children completely as the game creates the arrangement of objects that constructs the final exhibition.

The three children are part of Townley and Bradby, a collaborative family practice that explores the emotional intensity of family life. Townley and Bradby do this in amongst the domestic routine: games, dances, sayings and arrangements of objects are recorded as they happen within the family. Some of these are then reshaped until they find a form that can exist in the public space of a gallery.

Townley and Bradby have been commissioned by MK Gallery as part of two-year residency project Playing Out to explore Conniburrow and Central Milton Keynes. In collaboration with fellow artist Georgie Manley they have begun to consider ways to occupy Conniburrow’s outdoor spaces offering for example ‘Child-led Tours’ and the repurposing of objects through planting. They have spent time in Conniburrow’s green spaces known by some residents as ‘out the back’. They have worked with artist and Conniburrow resident Sarah Wright, who introduced them to the new Community Orchard. They have used green spaces as an outdoor studio where found objects can be gathered and repositioned, and new elements, like coloured cloths, can be added in. And they have explored different ways of moving through the retail areas of CMK.

A Game Played in the Gallery Over Two Days is part of this journey, exploring and investigating children’s play and our own interaction with objects and space. The exhibition also features films made in collaboration with Miles Umney as part of Playing Out.

The exhibition is created as a collaboration between Hope, Martha and Corin, Townley and Bradby, Georgie Manly, and Sarah Wright.