Artist Eamon O’Kane’s interactive installation makes direct visual and conceptual reference to educational play objects devised by educator and inventor of Kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel. For the artist, parenthood acted as the catalyst for this enquiry into methods of merging real life with his art practice where his ongoing concerns are the interplay of art, architecture design and education. Fröbel Studio makes direct visual and conceptual reference to the educational play materials known as Fröbel Gifts – the colorful spheres, cylinders, and tubes that were developed in the early 1800s by Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of Kindergarten. These tools are still instrumental the world over in unlocking creativity at an early age by teaching children about three-dimensional shapes and colours, and their relationship to the environment and nature.

“Engaging small children outside of children’s museums is anathema to the art world and radical in itself. No surprise that his installations satisfy on many levels, with a grab-bag of forms – some perfect, some fractured – opportunities abound for creating models of all things seen, considered, and imagined. Seemingly entropic , O’Kane’s works are deceptively balanced, and can change like a kaleidoscope moment by moment, inevitably into any and every new configuration.

While the unrelated detritus of so-called scatter art often serves up a vague, incoherent one-liner, its “creator” daring us to affect comprehension, Eamon O’Kane’s installations resonate with the innate logic of nature, a language we all share. No small feat to make new art that engages on a non-verbal level decades after Kandinsky and Mondrian. But O’Kane’s interests are more than optical, and only distantly spiritual. History, as he references architects and designers whose childhoods trod in Froebel’s garden, supplies a secondary or tertiary layer for consideration, so we may follow, if we wish, in the footsteps of some of kindergarten’s illustrious graduates like Wright and Eames, both of whom used the system to change the world.”

An excerpt from “The Garden of Children” by Norman Brosterman.

A History of Play was exhibited at Roscommon Arts Centre in 2014 and consequently toured Nationally in 2015 to Galway Arts Centre, The Model Sligo and Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge.