RC Art Gallery

Art as Play 

When an artist goes into the studio or workspace, they are choosing to engage actively with materials, ideas – beginning an exploration. While they might start with a goal in mind or an idea that has been incubating, the artist delves into the idea or material to see what happens. This is very similar to how children begin to play

One of the first things we associate with children is play and while play is remarkably difficult to define, its characteristics have often been described as six major attributes. Play is activity that is freely chosen and self-directed, rewarding in and of itself or intrinsically motivated, actively engaging the player/s (physically and/or mentally), emotionally meaningful or relevant, non-literal, and focused on process, not product. These attributes provide a seemingly accurate description of art as well.

Children choose to play, and self-directed play provides them experience and a sense of agency. Children play because they want to – playing is its own reward. Play provides opportunities to actively experience people, materials, and spaces, and to find out about the world. Children choose activities and materials that are relevant and/or meaningful to them. Importantly, the ways in which they play with materials can be seen to be an investigation of specific cognitive concepts or schema. Common behaviors, such as filling and dumping, carrying or moving objects from place to place, and tossing, are not random or misbehavior. Rather, they are best understood as investigations of concepts such as enveloping, volume, transfer or transportation, and trajectory.

The hallmark of children’s pretend or make-believe play is referred to as non-literality. In play one thing can stand for another, teaching symbolic thinking. Play is activity within a play frame that separates it from regular experience, within which ordinary meanings can be ignored and objects, actions, and situations can be understood in new ways. Johnson and colleagues (2005, p. 15) have written that in play “internal reality takes precedence over external reality.” For example, a checker is a disk of no significant value. Unless a player is seeking to be kinged to win; then its value exceeds its material by a lot! Non-literality, then, allows children to leave aside ordinary constraints to experiment with new possibilities.

Process-orientation is another foundational attribute of play. The focus on the process rather than the product is essential to the development of creativity and divergent thinking. When a child plays, they engage in open-ended activity that focuses them on the process rather than on the goals or outcomes. This means-over-ends orientation draws children into the activity and nourishes exploration, trial and error, experimentation, creative thinking, and risk-taking as they interact with materials and people to study the world. Isbell and Yoshizawa (2016, p. 22) wrote that when teachers focus on process “children are more likely to feel encouraged to keep experimenting instead of concerned about whether they have ‘correctly’ accomplished something you wanted them to reproduce.”

When an artist commences work, they begin to engage with materials and ideas. These may provide constraints, but they do not define a specific task or outcome. As they engage iteratively with the materials, the artist may find that they have changed, or the ideas they have in response have changed. The play/practice focuses the artist on the immediate activity with materials and ideas, to enter a state of flow in which the rest of the world and sense of time fall away. The process is open-ended, so there is always uncertainty about where the materials will lead. Since the outcome is not predetermined, the work is often a springboard to the next thing. For the artist, engaging in art is not about task completion, it’s about the process of creation.

An artist chooses to create art and directs their own physical and/or mental activity. They are intrinsically motivated to engage and derive satisfaction from the doing of something that is emotionally meaningful or relevant. The activity requires symbolic thinking, whether the created art is representational or not, and is focused on the process, which is uncertain and open-ended. This is a portrait of the artist as a player in the game of creating. The work of the artist, then, is play, in all its attributes.

Isbell, R. & Yoshizawa, S.A. (2016). Nurturing creativity: An essential mindset for young children’s learning. National Association for the Education of Young Children. 
Johnson, J. E., Christie, J. F., Wardle, F. (2005). Play, development and early education. Pearson Education. 

Aviva Dorfman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Education, Early Childhood
Edu