Playformance Aesthetics is the name I’ve given to the way my work has reshaped itself - through parenthood, through interruption, through the daily rituals of care. It’s not a theory I set out to write or a framework I consciously developed; it grew, slowly and quietly, out of lived experience. It’s how I make art now: in fragments, in between, often side by side with my family.

This approach draws from many places - relational art practices, early childhood pedagogies like Reggio Emilia, the gentle beauty and poetry of David Medalla’s participation-performance-propulsion works, the convivial communal cooking projects of Rirkrit Tiravanija, the improvisational life-practice of Sophie Calle. Most of all it is also rooted in my own home, which, as Gaston Bachelard writes, is the first space we learn to dream. My studio is now the dining table, the hallway, the shared family atelier-playroom. These domestic zones, so often considered mundane, become sites of dreaming and creativity.

Play is the way children learn - and play is also how artists stay alive inside. It is serious work. A way of testing the world, loosening its seams, and imagining something better.

Playformance Aesthetics values process as much as product, presence as much as polish. It allows joy, chaos, ritual, and exhaustion to co-exist in the creative act. I’ve made installations from formula tins I’ve collected from my children’s earliest years, stitched memory into translucent piña fabric, turned birthday parties into participatory happenings. These ephemeral events often unfold in non-art spaces like living rooms, playgrounds, backyard, early learning centres and community spaces - because that’s where real life happens. I am not sure why real art can’t exist in theses spaces as much as it does in our most valued galleries and museums.

This is not art about parenting. It is art made inside it. Sometimes it’s beautifully composed, sometimes it’s barely held together - but it’s always anchored in the real.

It’s a way of noticing. A way of staying present. A way of making something from the ordinary, before it disappears.