As I begin to embrace playfulness and attempt to recapture a childlike sense of wonder, I do recognise that humour is a key part of my playfulness. There is a teasing element to what I do as I play with words and objects, changing them or taking them out of context to give them status in their own right. In Museums, objects are very much taken out of their original context. They have often been found and moved from that place to be put behind glass cabinets to celebrate a certain time and place in history. In Max van Manen’s academic paper on Serendipitous Insights and Kairos Playfulness (2018), he reminds us that in the true play-world, ‘objects are not what they are in the ‘real’ world.’ For example, the swivel chair I am sitting on is but a chair in the ordinary world, but in the ‘play-world’ it can be a magic roundabout. ‘Play challenges us to dwell on the meaningful of things and events,’ he says. Objects have fixed meanings in the everyday life, but in the play-world, they ‘become images that tempt, entice and allure the players intimations of variations of meaningful imaginations and insights.’
So I guess, like a child, I have entered a play-world and the objects I discover and their inviting faces are no longer what they were, they have opened my mind to give them other ‘possible’ meanings, whereby I have indeed been surprised and engaged …and even moved by the insights they have given.
