Featured in When the World is Beautifully Strange
Timna Naim (b. 1995)
Creation Playground, 2025
Glazed ceramic
Dimension varies
Courtesy of the artist
About
Creation Playground is an interactive installation of five ceramic forms that invites participants to co-create within sculptural environments designed for tactile exploration, improvisation, and collective wonder. In a world that often feels chaotic and fragmented, Naim’s work offers a space to slow down, play, and imagine new ways of relating.
Rooted in the aesthetics of Funk ceramics, Naim’s project resists rigid definitions of beauty, utility, or identity. Instead, it embraces the surreal and the humorous, honoring the overlooked, the work-in-progress, and the strange as necessary parts of transformation.
Visitors are invited to contribute their own curious creations, however strange, beautiful, or unexpected, into a shared landscape where individuality blooms and collective imagination takes shape.
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INVITATION TO ADD TO ANY OF THE FIVE PILLARS OF PLAY:
Enter the playground and find a jar labeled “Please Play.” Take a ball of clay and begin to explore it with your hands. Let your curiosity guide your touch and your imagination shape your creation. When you feel your time with the clay is complete, place your piece on one of the five playgrounds.
Notice how your form relates to others, how proximity, contrast, and connection build a shared world and ask yourself: What might emerge when we give ourselves permission to be both vulnerable and playful? What worlds might we build together, if we begin with curiosity?
Location
Creation Playground is displayed on the left side of the Italianate Garden.
