It’s been an exciting week for me, finally starting to share images from Play Passages with everyone! I wanted to share a little more in depth about the process with each of the images, with their full stories and play memory maps right here.
Mindy Stricke, 2017
"Every summer, all summer, between the ages of 4 or 5 until about 10 years old, we played in the bamboo along a creek that ran through my family’s property and through many yards in our neighbourhood.
The creek, which we called “Chicken House Slough”, was shallow and muddy. We hid in the bamboo along the banks and pretended we lived there. We made up a religion with altars and figurines made of bamboo, string, pyracantha berries, vines and sticks. I felt free and powerful, as if I could build a society with my friends from whatever we wanted. We made “food” in tiny cups that we got from slicing a bamboo stalk between its joints. We stalked the creek, threw berries at an angry crawdad, and snuck into strangers’ backyards. It felt exciting and illicit." - Erin Koshal
Erin Koshal, 2017
Erin was one of the first participants in the project, a good friend of mine who lives in Toronto. When I was playing around with ideas for Play Passages, she practically lit up when thinking about her play memories from childhood of exploring the bamboo forests. When reflecting back, she said, “Looking back on these memories reminds me what it feels like to be utterly absorbed in an imaginary world with friends for days and days on end, almost without interruption.”
Together, we visited where she grew up on Google Earth, typing in the address and then seeing if there was a way to see the bamboo forest behind the house. Luckily, when we zoomed in, we could see into the creek on Google Street view. I used one of those angles to rephotograph off the ipad, using my macro lens to get really close and abstract the image slightly. I wanted the image to recall the magical days Erin playing back there.
Mindy Stricke, 2017
"I was in a garden with three to four other girls my age. There were lots of flowers and grass—soft green. It began to rain, and we danced and picked flowers. It began to pour. We got soaked, dancing and singing in the rain. We took off some or most of our clothes. We were rain fairies." - Brenda Simon
Brenda Simon, 2017
Brenda is the Director of Play Programs at EarthDay Canada, and she shared her play memory with me at a play memory collection event I did at one of EarthPlay’s pop-up adventure playgrounds in May. One of the interesting challenges of making an image from Brenda’s story was that she couldn’t remember exactly where the garden was that she had played in as a child, since she was probably only about 3 or 4.
So I had to get creative and use a little artistic license. Could I find a photo of another garden in Burlington Ontario that I could rephotograph? I decided to play around with this photograph below of the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, and when I looked through the macro lens, I almost gasped, because the close-up of the image evoked Brenda’s watercolour so perfectly.
