Pip & Pop: Deliciously beautiful candy craft world invades Queensland gallery

January 3, 2012

we miss you magic land! Pip & Pop installation. Photograph: Queensland Art Gallery

I posted earlier about Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art and their beautiful Yayoi Kusama kid-created Obliteration Room but the more time I spent on their website the more I found out about their Children’s Arts Centre. The verdict? I wish I was a kid in Queensland right now.

In addition to the Yayoi Kusama room, the gallery is currently playing host to the Pip & Pop installation ‘we miss you magic land!’.

Pip & Pop, we miss you magic land! - detail (2011) Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Photograph: Mark Sherwood

The work by duo Tanya Schultz and Nicole Andrijevic takes inspiration from a range of sources, from the Japanese Katamari video game series to the thirteenth century fantasy land of Cockaigne – a sort of garden of earthly delights where barley sugar houses and rains of cheese were not unknown.

Candy colours dominate the installation landscape – the product of hills and valleys of glitter, rainbow coloured sugar crystals, sand – which is peppered with all manner of kids craft supplies and cake decorations. The cascading granules of sand and sugar as well as the ornament populations made me think of Rina Banerjee’s work

Pip & Pop, we miss you magic land! - detail (2011) Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Photograph: Mark Sherwood

I think it’s a really smart idea to introduce children to modern art which uses materials and colours they will be familiar with from home and school. It adds context and is obviously full of ways in which parents and teachers can encourage them to try some of the ideas out for themselves.

The online aspects of the galleries are pretty cool too – the Obliteration Room has a Flash game which allows you to place dots in a blank room, offering a combination of normal dots and ‘moody’ dots which behave in different ways.

we miss you magic land! has a similar interactive environment but the drag-and-drop shapes are candy mountains, glitter clouds and shakeable seed plants which, once added to the picture, do a variety of things including attracting unexpected wildlife.

Below you can see a couple more pictures of other Pip & Pop installations including sweet sweet galaxy which was at Smiths Row gallery in Bury St Edmunds this time last year.

For more images from we miss you magic land! I’ve curated a Flickr gallery from the installation shots.