Project Description

Object Therapy Work_

Subhadra’s Puzzle

Daniel Emma, 2016

Subhadra is an educator at the Blue Gum Community School in Canberra, the puzzle’s home for the past 10 years. Puzzles are notoriously difficult and expensive to produce. Too often when pieces go missing they are considered useless and are thrown away – a child’s sense of achievement is diminished when a puzzle can’t be completed. Subhadra has been challenging this notion, asking the children, aged three to five, how they can continue to use the puzzle despite it missing several parts. When deciding to submit the puzzle to Object Therapy, there were many ideas from the children. Perhaps the puzzle could be turned into a coat, or its own world. Or maybe the puzzle could be turned into a new game without the confines of the frame… In repairing the object, Daniel and Emma leapt directly from this line of thought. They removed the puzzle from the frame and transformed it into a memory game titled ‘Memory Memory.’ They refurbished the pieces, making them look new again, an approach that is a commentary on why we buy things for that “new” feeling.

More about Object Therapy: Download the Object Therapy Catalogue

CREDITS_
Object Therapy was a Hotel Hotel project developed in collaboration with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Australian National University (ANU).
Curators: Guy Keulemans, Andy Marks, Niklavs Rubenis, Dan Honey
Project designers: Guy Keulemans, Andy Marks
Research investigators: Guy Keulemans, Andy Marks, Niklavs Rubenis
Photography: Lee Grant