Studio Sessions
Careful Playgrounds
with Rosanna Martin
September 2025
About the Studio Session
What is play? And what does one need in order to play well? How can play nurture and sustain a creative practice? The Cambridge Dictionary defines play as engaging in an ‘activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.’ What if we were to take play seriously, and to find new ways to give it practical purpose?
My 3 year old son says “I think I might want to do that” each time he thoughtfully rearranges his stretchy armed and legged plastic robot into configuration after configuration. Each rearrangement offers a new solution. He is playing and it is highly serious.
Other definitions of play include “to take part in” and “to pass”. There is an inclusivity to play. Is play best done with others or in solitude?
In this Studio Session play will be carefully foregrounded, to make a space for its seriousness to be toyed with.
About the Lead Artist
Rosanna Martin is an artist, educator and PhD student at Falmouth University. Rosanna co-founded Brickfield, a research driven participatory brickworks set within the china clay landscape of Cornwall that uses waste clay, quartz sand and mica to collectively make bricks by hand.
Spoons, roundabouts, belly buttons, plugholes and see-saws are just some of the motifs that have been drawn into Rosanna’s most recent body of sculptural ceramics. Informed by ideas around interdependence, the pieces have been made using locally gathered waste clays from the china clay extraction landscape, glazed with granite dust and ash and fired in a fast-fire wood kiln. The work combines elements of care-work, play-work and the post-industrial landscape, and have been made in response to the artist's experience of the early years of ‘solo’ parenthood.
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Wednesdays, September 10, 17, 24, & October 1 from 9-11am PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.