“Cave Crawl Crave / Monster’s Den” – installed 2011 and 2012
Created with claro cosco and Piffin Duvekot
Cave Crawl Crave was a multi-sensory immersive installation of three crawl-in domes 12 ft, 10 ft, 9 ft in diameter. The tactile and proprioceptive senses were especially engaged.
We were also offering fun.
Exploring inner and outer, The Caves were inspired by Snoezelen rooms, Pipilotti Rist, Carnival Fun Houses, and certain old-as-the-hills sweaty places. The stream of our experiences lash them together in our collective guts.
Intellectually, the concept is the relationship between fear and sensory integration. By crawling in, people could integrate their senses, overcoming the fear associated with the strange, and find safe or their inner locus of control. There was sometimes individual contemplation and reflection, and sometimes reflection and play with friends or strangers, and always a strong impression of the domes’ usefulness in mood moderation.
Cave Crawl Crave was initially created in response to a call out for a design for a really great tree-fort that children could crawl through representing a Monster’s Den for HarbourKIDS MonsterFest. It was then re-named and revised as Cave Crawl Crave, to be installed in the Milton art gallery’s installation of art addressing accessibility needs (2012), and remounted at the University of Toronto art gallery as part of Nuit Blanche (also 2012) and remaining for installed for two weeks following. The artistic vision remained largely the same, but the work needed to be re-sewn and stretched each time and the nuts and bolts – literally and figuratively – of the installation, and our relationship with it, evolved over the year.
Find the feeling of inside and outside: The outsides resembled strange hills covered in moss (old sweaters and burlap sacks that had been deconstructed, knitted, and stretched), while the insides suggested the domain of strange furry, egg-laying, cocoon making creatures. The effect was created with a play of light, texture, and narrative, using hundreds of mottled fur balls with random eyes and ears (made by Piffin Duvekot out of deconstructed teddy bears), plastic water and glitter filled light-up balls, mirrored Mylar, UV light with white stretch fabric, rope light, and more fun fur. Each dome had a different design for a different mood modulation (an in music) and invited imaginative narratives of relationships between them. The last installation included live electronic scrumbling musicians with sound art.
In the end we were more aware of artistic effects that we could re-create, but also how to guide or lead reactions to the work. We were successful quite quickly after opening the first installation in finding ways to create both loud and quiet spaces for children and adults. We learned tactics for to work against a straight forward playroom or festival feeling: promoting greater variety of responses through choices in layout of the space (ex. Where is the entrance door? Is a line necessary?), and written or verbal suggestions (“three rules: take off your shoes, don’t throw the hard balls, have fun!”), and active docents giving interpretative suggestions. We believe that children and adults benefit from being given freedom to explore their reactions to the work, but also will appreciate cues to enjoy a slightly more subtle or more complex experience of glitter-balls, Ultra-Violet, and Fun-Fur.
This installation also allowed me to develop hard skills over the year, in budgeting and sourcing, but also in structural design. The design of the actual geodesic dome structures was my own, drawing on my long ago study of engineering and architecture. Keeping with my penchant for using found objects, the struts are plumbing piping painted for ease of assembly (coding) and aesthetics. The hub system uses old bike inner-tubes with wing-nuts. The hub design is original, a collaboration with Duvekot. Duvekot also devised aesthetically consistent home-made cloth-pouch sandbags that used zip-lock bags full of beach sand, which was borrowed and replaced rather than stored.
Grey Muldoon Art 