Boxheads
The box has always been a highly prized object for play. So simple and so endlessly transformed. A weapon, a disguise, a crash mat, a hide-out, a building block for imaginary worlds that seem simple from the outside but are often layered with impenetrable meaning.
In play, time seems to stop. It may have only been minutes or it could have been hours. In the moment it’s as if time doesn’t exist and anything could happen.
The play is mediated by the rules. They create the shape in which play takes place and they are constantly being negotiated by the players and the world outside the game.
Play does not need an immediate practical goal, we play to seek pleasure and it can provide it’s own reward by being intrinsically enjoyable. We do it in our own time for our own reasons, it’s not required by duty even if we enter into it for reciprocal benefit. We play to bond with other humans or other animals or to the places we inhabit. We play to generate new forms of behaviour and ideas, to test our limits and to fall into different patterns of thinking, feeling and acting in the world.
Here, brothers playing together, evolving secret languages in response to the boredom of day to day family life, impervious to the outside world, feelings hurt and just as easily forgotten.
Peachey & Mosig are based in Gundungurra and Darug country, Blue Mountains, Australia.
Rachel Peachey & Paul Mosig are Australian visual artists who use field studies and play as research tools to create video,photography, mixed-media installation and internet based art works. They have an ongoing interest in human/environment relationships, which they try and understand from a range of perspectives. Their process is centred around collaboration, often working with their two children and practitioners from a range of other disciplines.