Australian artists are challenging preconceptions about playful, colorful art by demonstrating how tapping into their inner child can produce profound and socially conscious work. Three prominent artists - Beci Orpin, Glenn Barkley, and the collective Snuff Puppets - are redefining what it means to create "childlike" rather than "childish" art, using whimsy and wonder to engage audiences with serious topics.
Beci Orpin, a Melbourne-based illustrator, graphic designer, and installation artist, frequently encounters assumptions that her vibrant, colorful work is intended solely for children. "My work's always been quite colorful, it has a naivety to it, and those two things make people go, 'oh it's for children'," Orpin explains. While she has published children's books and her art does appeal to kids, she emphasizes that her primary audience consists of adults who need help reconnecting with their sense of wonder. Her latest installation, "Bunny Dearest" - a giant plush rabbit featured in the Joy exhibition at Melbourne's Immigration Museum - exemplifies this approach. The carpet beneath the installation is based on a dress her mother made for her, while the patchworks reference a quilt crafted by her grandmother.
Despite her playful aesthetic, Orpin tackles substantial issues including climate change, politics, and refugee rights. "If you present those issues with a sense of optimism and simplicity then it's really digestible for a whole lot more people, and potentially more people will pay attention to it as well," she notes. One of her graphics about compassion became so popular online that she was commissioned to transform it into a book titled "Take Heart, Take Action." After three decades in her career, Orpin acknowledges the ongoing challenge of being taken seriously as a female artist working in craft-based mediums, attributing some skepticism to patriarchal attitudes in the art world.
Sydney-based ceramic artist Glenn Barkley shares similar experiences with misunderstanding and miscategorization. A reviewer once dismissed his work and that of his peers as "childish," a characterization Barkley firmly rejects. "I don't think it's childish, I think it's childlike, and they're two completely different things. I think to be childlike is admirable," he states. Barkley's intricate ceramics, featuring pastel colors and hand-made shapes, range from vases to ceramic denim outfits. His artistic journey began unexpectedly during a casual pottery workshop, where touching clay for the first time made him realize he had found his calling. "From the moment I touched the material I thought, 'oh, I think I've wasted my life. I should have been doing this 20 years ago!'" he recalls.
Barkley's bright, colorful work doesn't avoid complex adult themes. His piece "Stuff White People Like" explores cultural obsessions with conspiracy theories through busts of historical figures like Harold Holt and JFK. "I do like big political ideas and cultural ideas," Barkley explains, "but sort of looking at them the way a child might." This approach allows him to examine serious subjects through a lens of curiosity and openness rather than cynicism.
The Melbourne-based Snuff Puppets collective takes the concept of inner child engagement even further, recognizing that childlike fascination extends beyond bright colors to include the gross, silly, and over-the-top elements that captivate people of all ages. Their public performances feature enormous puppets, some standing 10 feet tall, representing everything from giant babies to seagulls to "the full range of genitals." Chief executive and co-artistic director Andy Freer explains that the scale differential creates a powerful psychological effect: "You have an adult human, about five or six foot, but the puppet is like 10 foot, and so the adult becomes the child."
The Snuff Puppets deliberately explore taboo subjects, using puppets to push boundaries that would be impossible with human actors. "You can do things with puppets that you really can't do with any other human actor: you can chop their heads off, you can disembowel them, they can give birth," Freer notes. One of their most notorious performances, staged at festivals worldwide, serves as commentary on the meat industry. The skit begins playfully with puppet cows creating chaos among the crowd, generating laughter, but transforms when a butcher character arrives to round them up, turning the performance into a cacophony of fake blood, excrement, and general pandemonium.
The audience reactions to Snuff Puppets' work demonstrate the power of accessing childlike responses to process difficult realities. "It just gets worse and worse and worse, and people are horrified," Freer says with amusement, "But they've been laughing, and horrified at the same time, so they're reverting to this very immediate, childlike response." The impact extends beyond momentary entertainment - Freer recalls receiving a postcard from someone struggling with depression who found the "chaos and the magic and the wildness" invaluable in realizing that "life can be a crazy madhouse, and we can all have fun and it's not so serious after all."
For these artists, maintaining connection with their inner child is both natural and intentional. Orpin credits her mother, who is "super young at heart," for modeling this approach throughout her life. "She's never going away," Orpin laughs about her inner child. However, she acknowledges that her perception of joy has evolved with age, influencing her artistic practice. "The joy of experiencing something for the first time is really hard to get, so as you get older the joy seems to come from small things, like if I get a perfect cup of tea in the morning, or it's really large, unexpected things, and so that's what I was trying to create with Bunny Dearest."
Orpin advocates for pushing oneself toward new experiences as essential for maintaining childlike wonder. Through workshops she's conducted, she's observed that adults often derive more enjoyment than children from creative activities. "Adults don't allow themselves the time and the space to actually make something," she explains, "So, when their kids are sitting down and making something they're like 'oh great I can do this too'." Barkley offers a complementary perspective, suggesting that accessing one's inner child is just the beginning: "I also think you need to get your inner child to take you to your inner adult, and those two people need to meet each other."
These artists demonstrate that childlike approaches to art-making and subject matter can produce work that is both accessible and profound, challenging the false dichotomy between sophistication and playfulness while proving that wonder, curiosity, and joy remain powerful tools for engaging with the complexities of contemporary life.
