The Ringtales Playground, 2025

Commissioned by Moonee Valley City Council (Australia) for The Playground Project Melbourne at Incinerator Gallery, The Ringtales Playground is a site-specific playable public art commission, inviting children to a world of imaginative, free nature play.

This outdoor installation, consisting of three distinct design elements, is an homage to modernist architects, Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) and Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961), designers of the original Incinerator building, as well as Aldo van Eyck (b. 1951), a city planner of Amsterdam, whose practice over many decades, championed the integration of play and public spaces.

A 12-metre-long horizontal monkey-bar, produced in 2016 by Kunsthalle Zurich for its eponymous exhibition, greets visitors at Incinerator Gallery’s large iron gates. Once omnipresent at European playgrounds of the 1950s, it is re-purposed for The Playground Project Melbourne in glowing hues of pink and orange.

Compared to local and international playgrounds of today, where risk mitigation tends to trump the opportunity for creative adventure, the monkey bar is an invitation to fun, ‘risky play’: it is a long narrow path with only three vertical hoops for hand support and often demands the management of oncoming human traffic.

Located by the gallery’s main entrance, kids are seen engaging reluctantly at the start of their visit, but returning on their way out with increased confidence and ambition to complete the 12-metre course without falling or adult assistance. The monkey bar embodies the exhibition’s motto: Climb, Fall, Imagine.

Nature play, which is an underlying theme of the headline exhibition, curated indoors by Swiss urban design and political scientist, Gabriela Burkhalter; is personified by the round wooden sand pit: echoing the architectural motifs of van Eyck and the Griffins, and nestling among Country’s lush plant and animal life. It is positioned next to a colourful 3-D printed water table realised in the shape of the Maribyrnong River, which is located a few minutes’ from the gallery.

As a playful tribute, the overall composition echoes the River’s Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung name, translating to “I can hear a ringtail possum.”

BoardGrove Architects is also responsible for the exhibition design of The Playground Project Melbourne.

” … [Playgrounds] have a long history in children’s play spaces dating back to the 1800s when Fredrich Frobel, widely considered the creator of the kindergarten, promoted the benefits brought by playing with sand in the open air. Then in the early 1900s the coupling of water with sand play was embraced in Scandinavia with many landscape playgrounds appearing.”

– Holly Board and Pete Grove, Architecture AU, July 2025