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With Catching Feelings, Wade and Leta bring a four-sided slide, spinning platforms, and a welcome lack of solemnity to Shanghai’s sculpture biennial.
A grandfather and his granddaughter kept returning to Catching Feelings to play hide-and-seek. Wade Jeffree and Leta Sobierajski noticed them during a week with their new installation at Shanghai’s Jing’an Sculpture Park. They also spotted a man in a business suit taking a turn on the slide. It was a good week for a sculpture intended to be used.
Spread across 24.5 meters, the playscape has a turquoise structure at its center, with slides extending in four directions. A blue chute opens in a bright pink oval; striped slopes flare out beside it. Above, a blue sphere sits on a broad orange disc. Rings and stacks of rounded forms rise on slender metal posts around it, their colors standing out against the park’s trees. There is plenty to catch the eye before anyone starts moving.
The pair’s graphic design background shows in the way the same shape is put to several uses. A circle becomes a flat disc overhead, an open ring further along, or a platform underfoot. Automotive paint gives the metal its glossy color, with light catching the curves of the pink and green forms. The narrow supports leave the scene open, allowing people and trees to remain visible between the objects.
Earlier kinetic works by Wade and Leta have depended on motors or strong winds. Here, visitors supply the movement. Ground spinners and aerial bars accompany the slide, while the spaces between structures leave room for games of the visitors’ own invention. The grandfather and granddaughter had found one possibility. Others emerged as people met on the spinning platforms or explored the installation together. The artists describe this activity around their work as something they want to keep developing throughout their practice.
Created for the ninth Jing’an International Sculpture Project, Catching Feelings is part of Shapes of Becoming, curated by Cheng Jing of UCCA Lab. The exhibition considers sculpture through its materials, scale, and relationship to the body. For Wade and Leta, that last relationship involves getting people physically into the work. Their interest in bringing visitors closer to their tangible surroundings takes a straightforward form: something to grasp, a platform to turn, a slide to go down.
The title leaves room for what happens beyond those intended uses. Among the visitors the artists remember was an 84-year-old and his partner, who chose the installation as the setting for their video recordings. New friendships formed on the spinners. The duo had hoped to make a place where different generations would find reasons to play together, and people were taking them up on it. Enthusiastically enough, they report, that the playscape has since been assigned opening and closing hours.
Photography by Wade and Leta.
