Over the lovely bank holiday weekend, Squidge Mags’ team were trying to think of fun, cheap things to do. The Tate had the perfect answer; a giant indoor assault course  and endless bits of creative fun and interactive art to sink your teeth into…. And all gloriously free hooray!

We started at the assault course, this was a remake of the 1970’s sculpture created by Robert Morris ‘Bodyspacemotionthings’. It was first exhibited in 1971, before the days of health and safety, and it asked people to interact with art in a way that had never been allowed before. After 4 days the exhibition had to close due to over enthusiastic response to this new challenge. 

The Tate Modern had recreated this sculpture taking into account modern safety standards. The result was pretty impressive. You needed to get there early as there were soon queues forming around all the wooden slides, see-saws, tubes, slopes and pivot boards. But it was endless amounts of fun, the highlights being the Teaspoon being told off for running down the slope when you were meant to use the rope. The Illiterate Knife Rack falling over in the giant tube while it was rolling around. Some over-enthusiastic use of the sew saw, involving rapid running back and forth to dismayed onlookers. The Teaspoon falling over on the slide due to unsuitable foot wear and being forced to chose between people looking up her skirt or shuffling slowly up backwards (eventually I was dragged up by the Knife Rack!)

Generally awesome fun, as someone who always wants to touch sculptures, and generally gets told off, it was wonderful to interact with this piece so fully. Also great to see other people approaching art in a totally new way. 

Then we moved outside, to the magical land of fairy tales, after a bit of wandering round, we were invited to make a tree out of moss (the answer obviously being yes!) As part of the Long Weekend there was a whole host of activities to get people doing art. A lot of these were designed for the younger audience, not that that stopped us! After making some slightly shoddy trees out of moss, we then created characters to dwell in the magical forest (awesome). From doing this we discovered you could collect stamps and win prizes through your artistic activities.

The Knife Rack’s face lit up ‘we can win medals…’ cue all three of us getting very excited and deciding what task to do next. Some highlights were contributing to a giant clay sculpture, explaining what it meant to be a nomad, talking to a conjurer, making up stories, learning about plants and drawing a spider. And we reaped the rewards of badges and a medal a piece!

The atmosphere outside was fantastic, there were loads of children engaging in art, being creative and enjoying themselves. Live music, dance, cinema as well as an ever growing collection of amateur art adorning the trees and ground. It was wonderful to see art bringing so many different people together, the Tate and free art galleries have always worked to bring art to the masses. Events like this one brought that message back again, that and we got to get medals and play on a giant jungle gym… all in all not bad for absolutely zero dollar.

Here’s what we won: