15-april-25 — Yunzhi / Melissa Li

Notes

08-06-2025

02-05-2025

16-04-2025

15-04-2025

06-04-2025

29-03-2025

20-03-2025

11-03-2025

11-03-2025

28-02-2025
21-02-2025
12-12-2024
29-07-2024
Bibilography

15 April 2025 - Nostalgic Playground

(Norfolk 2018)

(a-n 2017)

Rupert Norfolk's Playground is a sculptural piece that began as a proposal of a digital study of familiar playground equipment in his Maquette for Playground. He took forms like seesaws and swings, then digitally reconfigured them into unfamiliar, abstracted structures. What began as the geometry of play became something speculative and inert. I find his approach striking because these sculptures retain their sense of kinetic memory, even though they can no longer be used. The work invites you to remember what it once was, and imagine what it could do, but denies any real interaction. It sits in that uncanny space between function and fiction.

His's maquette for Playground came across while I was researching digital-physical translations and looking deeper in his later, finalised project. The idea of digitally distorting a memory-object before materialising it in steel feels closely related to how I shape the digital fragments in Home is a dwelling path. Whether it’s a 3D scan of a room or a ceramic form built from a memory, my work also leans on the viewer to animate something otherwise inert. His proposal for a public forecourt helped me think through the importance of site, and how the same object can be experienced differently based on its context. Norfolk offers a sculptural logic that is not static, but speculative, which is what I try to embody in my own installations.