Lego Group Collaboration

Art Basel miami beach, The Lego Group Center for Creative Flow, W Hotel

When I walk through the world, I am constantly experiencing what I have come to call intrusive color thoughts. I notice every bit of color and its relationship to surrounding textures and I am in a constant state of sensory overload because my brain wants to rearrange what it sees but can’t. In order to regulate, and process this intense visual experience, I need to spend a certain amount of time physically rearranging color and texture in my studio. LEGO bricks became a part of my practice when I came to realize they are bits of modular color that I can easily rearrange to make work that satisfies my brain’s need to order what it perceives as color chaos in certain environments. 

These pieces reference the natural world quite a bit, and in doing so, they highlight spaces that I generally feel quite regulated in to begin with-forests and gardens beaches and places where Mother Nature has been given free range to paint often settle me. Urban environments can be far more dysregulating because balance and harmony in the bigger picture are often absent, so my brain gets stuck on all the tiny details I would change. I like living in BC because I am able to get into a variety of regulating natural spaces very easily and quickly. We are able to interact in a very tactile way with our environment, something I couldn’t do in the same way when I lived in New York. Tactility is very important to my life and practice as the neurodivergent need to touch certain things and avoid others is deeply embedded.

When I was approached for this project, I wanted to use some of the elements from the new LEGO botanic sets to create my own versions of some of my favorite natural environments and the creative energies I associate with them. For my first piece, The Caretakers of Wonder Set the Stage, I thought of the energy of early spring, full of potential and possibility, when one idea easily leads to the next. I remembered when the first warm days would arrive in New York City and everyone would hit the park with a contagious spontaneity, creating a feeling like anything could happen. The title references one of our favorite vintage children’s books called The Caretakers of Wonder by Cooper Edens, about the imaginary stage setting that goes on behind the scenes to keep our world full of childhood wonder. For me, this is what LEGO bricks can do; they enable ideas to flow spontaneously and let wonder and creativity lead. I do not plan what my pieces will look like, but rather I let each brick attached inform the next. It’s all improvisational and spontaneous, just like those early spring days.

For the second piece, I envisioned one of my family’s favorite environments, a beach. I wanted to include tidal pools and reef structures, crashing waves, and soothing colors, to capture a feeling of peaceful ebbing and flowing, an expansive creativity where we can lay back and let our mind wander aimlessly, circling back on ideas as needed or letting them stretch on and on into the horizon. This piece is called The Current Always Shape the Growth and I wanted to reference the way our environment and what we are exposed to shapes who we end up being. When our creativity is supported at a young age, it can grow with us, but when we have no outlets, no tools, no creative toys, our creativity is stunted and we outgrow it. LEGO bricks help ensure creative thinking and problem solving stick around through various stages of development. 

The third piece I made for this project was titled Call the Night Fairies, which for me is a garden just when the fireflies come out, that time of day when things become more mysterious, more full of wonder and curiosity. When I became a parent I took on the job of making sure the world has magic for my children to believe in, and I take that job very seriously. When my children were smaller we would tell them I whispered to the wind at bedtime to call the night fairies to protect them in the night. The night fairies would come and whisper all the good things about my children into their ears as they slept, keeping away bad dreams and encouraging magical ones. I still remember the last time my son, now 7, requested I call the night fairies. Encouraging belief in things that don’t exist helps encourage imagination and creative thinking. It’s always been important to me as a parent and as an artist to create work that inspires a sense of wonder, a sense of something bigger than us that doesn’t belong to belief but to the suspension of disbelief. If I want my kids to grow into abstract thinkers, I can’t require them to live in this world only. I need to create access to other worlds and give them the tools and toys to create things that don’t exist yet. I want them to make something in order to find out what that thing looks like, not make something until it looks like something that already exists. LEGO bricks enable this for our family and give my kids autonomy and success. 

For my last smaller work, I thought of our many, many family forest walks and all the mushroom spotting we do. I thought of the interconnected fungal networks that run beneath the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People, enabling the rich BC forests to grow and thrive. I thought of all the small elements that come together to bring an idea to fruition, all the connections that get formed, and how each choice has its own ripple effect. For the title of this piece I once again referenced a children’s book we read frequently, What Do you Do with an Idea, by Kobi Yamada, which details the journey of one boy’s idea from something small and nagging to something that spreads beyond him and changes the world for the better. Sometimes, we don’t know the power of our own ideas, and we can’t anticipate how something we make can grow beyond us, affecting many others. Working with LEGO bricks as a medium has been this way for me. It started small, with just an idea that I didn’t have to build anything, that I could just reorder the color, and now, it’s become the biggest piece of work I’ve ever made, reaching so many people. It all started with a single stack of 4 2x2 plates my son handed me, saying he thought I’d like the colors. And now this small idea is going global.

Lastly, for the large-scale multi-panel work, I didn’t want to go in what I thought would be the expected direction, using the botanic sets to create a large floral piece. Instead, I thought of nurse logs, roots, and the underground fungal and mycelium networks that enable the forests to thrive because for me, LEGO bricks help form roots that enable kids’ creativity to thrive. While I did not have a concrete image in my head, I envisioned the light of the woods, the decay and crumbling texture of the red rotting wood often found in Pacific-Northwest nurse logs, damp and puddly ground, lush plant life that defies seasonality, and an interconnected underground that forms the basis for it all. For me, toys are where creativity starts. LEGO bricks offer autonomy, an ability to see an idea to fruition, to plan on both a micro and macro level, to think big and detailed at the same time. When kids can feel successful early on in making their ideas happen, they get a taste for it, they can see their own potential. And when we know we are capable of building our own ideas, we get into a habit of letting them grow.