Virginia Ivanicki-Strell

Play time is serious business. Balance in our existence is increasingly hard to come by, bombarded as we are with news of disasters and dangers near and far, made to fear through daily doses of worse case headlines and threatened with seemingly imminent catastrophe - financial, environmental, or political. The world and all its foibles are at our doorstep. But also, the world and its glories are there too. The more we are threatened, the more we need to play. We always have. It's how we are able to continue.

Whether we take time to reflect, alone or with another being, human or animal; whether we find joy in active play or the solitary contemplation of a perfect wave below a perfect sky, we require downtime, playtime, 'my' time and all the frivolous pursuits the over worked human mind can muster to counter daily wars, real or imagined, faced through increasingly instant info-highways.

'Play Time' is a celebration of the thing that keeps one foot firmly marching on in front of the other through all our woes. Birds do it, whales do it and mankind does it. Across boundaries of race, place, era and even species, Play is as natural as breathing - and as necessary.

As an artist, I find it is my glorious duty to remind and encourage the pursuit of happiness if not downright serial hedonism, with my images. I have attempted to capture some of the many moods and situations of holiday rituals from the last century, so many of which are created around bodies of water. In my personal pursuit, addicted to aviation as I am, playtime includes an airplane. The fabulous water birds, Seaplanes, combine the joys of water and flying, and so form part of the subject of this series.

Water is often the conduit of thought. It can carry away the troubled ones and bring to mind the hopeful and pleasant. The symbolism within the pieces here are fairly plain and simply understood. We come together near water, we are water, we find pleasure in water almost unanimously. It's endless horizon is hypnotic and meditative when seen from the air or the beach blanket.

Let us play on. Virginia Ivanicki-Strell, 2009