The forum -

As the Makers Take collective, we explored as a group what the Christmas season meant to us. Firstly the sense of place has a strong hold for us living on the Gold Coast, as many of us have spent Christmas Holidays with family by the beach. Relaxing and opening up dialogue with our extended families we may not get to see often enough. We seem to as a nation, follow this trend of coming together at Christmas time to catch up. The Gold Coast, also being a top tourist destination for Australians and foreigners alike it seemed paramount to include this aspect of place in our brief.

There is a strong image amongst Australians idolizing a hot Christmas holiday relaxing by the beach and opening up discussion with family and friends and helping to tie together the connections of our community. We pushed this idea to its simplest forms to help develop our concept. For us, the conclusion was that Christmas time is about togetherness. We make more time at Christmas to develop our social bonds and strengthen our community. It is a time when Australians come together.

From this idea, we pushed concepts which could help in some way to promote this important part of our culture. Instead of creating merely a sculpture to help people reflect, we wanted instead to create an installation which would help develop our current need for the festive season in a modern Australian context. Through this we explored sculptural like furniture pieces that would act as a forum point in a prominent community space to promote more dialogue between not just families and friends but also strangers.

Through the use of playful stadium like seating arrangements we have created a sense of place that invites the user to come and explore the forms, relax in the netting and face inwards to other members of the community. Our intentions here are to encourage people to talk and interact with strangers from their community, the way that children seemed to do so easily when they interact on a playground.

Makers Take is the collaboration of artists, designers and architects Jay Jermyn, CJ Anderson, Chris Miller, Lisa Kajewski, Daniel Wilson and Tim Wilson