CASE STUDY KATIE SCHWAB AT COLLECTIVE


Artist Katie Schwab is known for creating playful and immersive spaces for all ages. Her physically interactive installations at Tate, Baltic, Arnolfini and the Serpentine have inspired kids and families to explore new play possibilities through unusual forms, images, patterns and materials. Schwab says: ‘I’m interested in creating environments that foster open-ended play, are non-directional, using


sensory learning and child-led approaches.’


Over autumn and winter 2022 and spring 2023 she toured a new, play-centred work, The Seeing Hands, first to Liverpool’s Bluecoats gallery and then Edinburgh’s Collective gallery situated within a round, brick tower, once used as an observatory. Schwab’s practice is both site specific but also about sustainability, sourcing most of her materials locally, from waste processes if possible, and then ensuring maximum adaptability and reusability.


She says: ‘Whenever I begin a project, my first approach is spending time in the space getting a sense of the context, the history of the buildings, looking at the architecture, the detailing of how the buildings are made up. The space at Bluecoats used to be a school, and in the renovations of the building the architects had left some areas where you could see the brickwork through the plasterboard. There were also parallels between the two spaces, both had these triangular features in the architecture and recurring brick motifs.’


Her resulting structures responded in a variety of ways, not just in geometries but also in patterns: ‘For Collective, there’s a block of tiles echoing the window panes, and walls have these offset squares that mirror the brickwork. Part of it is around drawing out relationships to the built environment but also about creating these shared spaces of interaction, and of coming together, and engaging the senses in different ways.’ The title of the show and the ethos draws on the work of Bruno Munari, the Italian designer and


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