When JArts approached N+T to commission a public artwork about freedom, I immediately thought of Sari Carel. Her work, much of which focuses on translation from one modality to another, broadly considers relationships and communication between people and places. I thought of her work with sound, and how this modality can traverse so many boundaries, and, more superficially, about how sounds bring people together.

Sari immediately thought of playgrounds when I approached her. Following this interest, we spent a warm, late Summer day walking Boston and visiting about twelve playgrounds. That (literal) legwork to see how the fabric and texture of Boston change with every new neighborhood, and how each community interacts with their playground, greatly informed The Shape of Play, installed earlier this month. The project, comprising six sculptures and a sixteen-minute, six-channel soundscape harmonizing sounds made from an experimental “playing” area playgrounds with a variety of instruments, including hands, pebbles, and drumsticks. This process was formed through this foundational research and processing of place. We couldn’t have predicted our current reality while walking around (IRL, and maskless!) a year ago, and therefore, none of the twists and turns of designing, fabricating, and installing a public artwork despite social distancing. But Sari’s initial interest in playgrounds, through the lens of freedom, gained further resonance once the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Sari and I chatted by phone about a week after we installed The Shape of Play to discuss some of the themes, her process, artistic influences and what the project has meant to her.

Leah Triplett Harrington: How do you feel this project, The Shape of Play, has expanded your previous practice having worked with both sound and sculpture before?

Sari Carel: The Shape of Play clearly took my work to a whole new sphere. What was really pushed further is my great desire to work on a project that is ambitiously expansive and exists in the public sphere, but that is not monumental. A piece that is really formed by the process of making it, in this case researching playgrounds and playing them like instruments. It’s not just a matter of execution, it accrues meaning through the process and you can feel and experience its process through its formation. This externalizing of the process is something I’m really committed to, but it’s not easy to do, showing what’s happening in your studio or in your head and making it tactile and tangible for an audience. The Shape of Play really allowed me to go very deeply into those kinds of explorations.

Leah Triplett Harrington: I love what you just said about how this project is so ambitious. This project brings together so many themes. Play is a way to process and explore, and you need freedom of movement and mind to do those things. But this work also calls on us to pay attention to the unmonumental, whether that’s the sounds that make up our everyday, or the playgrounds that make up our neighborhoods.

This piece really explores the connection between childhood play or development and Modern art. I’m thinking in particular about the Bauhaus, and how you pay tribute to the relationship between theories of childhood and Modern art. Will you talk about that?

Sari Carel: Sitting in these playgrounds with my daughters, I realized that there’s a real richness to playgrounds. Intuiting there is more to this most ordinary experience made me want to learn more about the history of these structures. I started researching and discovered that many theories of play influenced early theories of modern art and design. As we’ve discussed, Walter Gropius actually invited a kindergarten teacher to teach students at the Bauhaus school.

But through this research, I also realized that this narrative of play and modernism is really another meaningful layer added to Modern art’s official narrative. In thinking of Modern abstract paintings, like those by Paul Klee or Kandinsky, you can’t ignore that these works are influenced by Friedrich Froebel’s theories on how to educate children through play (and abstraction and art!) instead of rote repetition, of allowing them to be playful, free, and exploratory. These were really new ideas more than 100 years ago, and over time, we’ve forgotten how connected they are to abstraction. Even today, the official art historical narrative mostly pushes this interrelationship aside. It is ignored because it belongs to the realm of children and those who take care of them, a domestic, female space.

Leah Triplett Harrington: Will you talk about how the sound and the sculpture build on each other in this piece?

Sari Carel: They are in a very fluid and open-ended conversation. One thing that I thought was very beautiful is how these structures are built out of basic shapes and forms, but they create rhythms together. There’s a reverberation between them, and that was very much something that I wanted to have run throughout the process of the work, both in its sculptural and auditory aspects.

Leah Triplett Harrington: Reverberation is a nice word, it implies constant reciprocity between these two elements. Speaking of, what have you learned through this process? What most challenged you as an artist?

Sari Carel: Creating new artwork for a new city...I mean, it challenged me in so many ways! It was important for me that the piece grew from Boston. We did a pretty extensive amount of research and legwork into Boston’s playgrounds. Walking Boston, as fundamental as that may sound, allowed me to explore the city with physical exertion. I experienced the city with my body, and walking to many different playgrounds and traversing neighborhoods by foot brought in the exploration that I wanted to be part of this project.

Leah Triplett Harrington: When you visited I really wanted to walk through several different neighborhoods so you could see how everything was connected but also so different.

Sari Carel: I feel like I had a dialogue with Boston through this process. There’s a tension between the local and the universal, and that’s part of this project. Playgrounds are everywhere, but it’s really the neighborhoods that make the playgrounds, and all neighborhoods have their own fabric and texture.

I always learn when I make a piece of public art, I learn so much, I'm not done learning. Every time I learn more about what public art can offer within civic space. What is public art good for? That’s the trickier question.

I don’t have a good answer. But every time I work on a project, there’s a really long and deep learning experience that stays with me, and carries over to the next project.