Reticulated Gambol

My name's Christian Giroux and I work in collaboration with Daniel Young and together we produced this piece called "Reticulated Gambol". If you look at the sculpture you'll see that it's made up of 9 nodes. Each node is identical. It has a covered curving canopy and its own platform. And from each node you've got 4 choices. There are usually 2 climbers, where you can get up and down from it, a curved climber or a spiral climber. And then it connects to the other nodes by either a cylindrical crawl tube or an arched walkway.

When we make sculpture we're often looking for guidelines that are predetermined for us. And in this instance, because we're working with a real place and real people, we do look to the conditions of the site to inform the shape of the work. We basically went into it knowing that we wanted to make an interactive work of art, and our personal aesthetic preferences tend toward minimalist, geometric, abstract forms. And we also are very much involved in everyday industrial forms and also industrial design and prototyping. And we really love this particular kind of playground equipment. You see it everywhere throughout Ontario, so it's familiar to everyone. So we wanted to use that as the basic language for our sculpture. So what determined the limitations then were the physical space allotted for the park and the safety guidelines that determine what you can or cannot do. We really like this older system because you really see the pipes and the methods by which it is welded or bolted together. There's something very elegant in its simplicity.

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