The Parallel Players : The Art of Play

The Parallel Players

On now until 1 March 2026

Old Butchers Shop Gallery

112 Seymour Street, Soldiers Hill, Ballarat VIC 3350

There are millions of quotes about childhood. We just rarely write our own down.

What we do instead is store them in our bodies. In smell. In colour. In the texture of plastic. In the weight of a doll. In the choreography of lining up toy soldiers across the lounge room floor.

The Parallel Players, Lauren Matthews, Emily Van Der Molen and Robyn Fisher, have done something deceptively simple and deeply rigorous. They have gone back. Not to romanticise. Not to perform nostalgia. But to examine what play was doing for them.

Their invitation describes the exhibition as an exploration of play as a human centred survival strategy. That feels accurate. The works land straight in the arterial memory of singular childhood experience.

Because experience is never collective in the way we pretend it is.

Even siblings raised in the same home do not share a childhood. Each child develops their own internal world. Their own reading of family dynamics. Their own strategies for communication and safety. Their own desires, likes and aspirations. Their own understanding of what normal looks like.

And in the 80s and 90s, normal was heavily branded.

Television became both companion and babysitter. Major companies built empires on aspirational childhoods. Disney shaped fantasy. Mattel engineered desire. Entire identities could be constructed around ownership. If you had the doll, the castle, the dream house, the stickers, the accessories, you were closer to belonging.

The sensory memory is immediate and personal experiences start to flash through me like a step back in time. The chemical sweetness of a Strawberry Shortcake doll. The rubbery petroleum scent when you tore open a sealed bag of plastic cheap animals or army men. The painstaking concentration of positioning little armies with tanks toward each other in preparation for an imagined World War Three.

Toys aren’t the passive objects adults assume them to be. . They are used as companions. Co conspirators. Stage sets for rehearsing power, care, control and escape.

The title The Parallel Players is precise. The artists work collaboratively in a shared space, often with shared materials and subject matter. There are recognisable icons including the ever present Cabbage Patch Kids, yet each artist remains distinct.

Parallel play is a developmental stage. Children play beside one another without necessarily playing together. Separate worlds. Shared floor space.

There is something profound in the way this concept extends into adulthood. The exhibition suggests a shared cultural landscape, but insists on the singularity of lived experience. The toys honoured here are signifiers of companionship during times that may have been isolated, lonely, or simply interior.

Matthews embroidered statement reads

“Create the childhood that you needed.”

It is both tender and direct. It acknowledges absence without dramatising it. It offers agency without denying history.

Van Der Molen writes

“If you’re hating it, you’re doing it wrong.”

This is not a call for ease. It does not suggest that meaningful work should be simple or free from challenge. Creative practice is demanding. Growth is uncomfortable. Difficult conversations are necessary.

What it does ask is something more honest.

Why are we choosing the hard thing? Are we pursuing it because it aligns with who we are? Because it stretches us toward something true? Or are we enduring it out of habit, expectation or fear of stepping outside the norm?

In childhood, many of us pushed through discomfort in order to fit in. To have what the other kids had. To be seen as normal. In adulthood, that pattern can continue quietly. Emily’s statement cuts through that inherited script. It suggests that challenge without purpose becomes self punishment. That difficulty without integrity erodes joy.

Fishers contribution is sharp and disarming

“Everyone needs a pool fence.”

It reads as suburban practicality, but it also speaks to boundaries. To safety. To hindsight. To the ways we now speak about helicopter parenting and lawnmower parents, adults smoothing every surface before a child encounters it.

There is a cultural tendency to mock parental vigilance. To romanticise the so called freedom of earlier decades. Yet that freedom existed alongside silence. Alongside children being seen and not heard. Alongside unspoken rules about never making an adult uncomfortable. Alongside social norms that protected reputation more than vulnerability.

Play, in this context, becomes more than pastime. It becomes rehearsal for autonomy. A way to construct controlled environments when external systems feel fixed.

What is striking about this exhibition is its joy.

Not kitsch irony. Not empty nostalgia. But genuine pleasure in material. Sewing. Embroidery. Fluorescent colour. Fringe. Applied media. Techniques historically coded as feminine and therefore dismissed.

The contemporary art industry has long been uneasy with craft when it is unapologetically linked to women’s experiences. Work is often reduced to skill as a way of minimising conceptual depth. As though material intelligence were somehow lesser. As though growing up immersed in sewing and making was not itself worthy of interrogation.

The Parallel Players do not ask permission. They lean into the material language of their childhoods and interrogate it through disciplined practice. They mine their own memories with rigour. They work beside one another, in parallel, constructing personal narratives that speak broadly without flattening difference.

The takeaway is not nostalgia.

It is permission.

Permission to examine where we came from. Permission to acknowledge that joy and loneliness can coexist. Permission to keep playing. Permission to create the childhood we needed and perhaps still need.

Age is not a barrier to creative expression. It never was.

Tas Wansbrough

February 2026