Artist in Residency: Building a Play Area

If you are a regular visitor to St Fagans you may have noticed:

a. The big red crane

and

b. the play area has gone.

The big red crane is obviously temporary as all the building work goes on for the new and improved St Fagans, and luckily the lack of a play area is also temporary as we are BUILDING A NEW ONE! not only that we are building a new one with Nils Norman - an artist who has been working extensively around play for a number of years.

Although Nils has been on board for a good few months now (with support from Arts Council Wales and the Heritage Lottery Fund), it has taken a while for the project to get going as there is so much organising to do beforehand!

We also needed to appoint two supporting artists to work on the project with Nils which we did at the end of last year. These support artists will be helping with research as well as community engagement. We want the play are to be unique, bespoke to St Fagans, accessible to all ages and abilities, create links with the collections, is fun and is also a work of art. To do this the artists will be undertaking lots of research - looking through our archive and stores, as well as holding workshops for community groups and visitors into what kind of play area they would like to see.

They are currently at the research stage which will take a few months, Nils will then provide some drawings, we will *all* have a look at them and report back and then all going to plan the actual construction will start towards the end of this year, with a finished play area for spring next year! (don't hold me to those dates)

If you have any ideas, or if you have seen some great play areas, please let me know. This is such an exciting project which I will keep you updated on as it progresses. Next post, i'll introduce you to our supporting artists.

For more information about Nils Norman's work, visit his website