Gallery: Kids Can Color With Their Heads and Feet at This Absurdist Crayon Exhibit
Photo: Mathery Studio/National Gallery of Victoria01-08A2638
Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria has the coolest kid's museum ever. It's called *Pastello: Draw Act*.
Photo: Mathery Studio/National Gallery of Victoria02Pastello-matheryphotoe
Created by Italian design duo Mathery Studio, *Pastello* is an interactive gallery that turns the act of drawing with crayons into a full body exercise.
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There are three rooms, with walls and tables covered in huge sheets of paper. But instead of 96-count boxes of Crayolas, the Mathery team stocked the exhibit with wildly reinvented versions of crayons.
Photo: Mathery Studio/National Gallery of Victoria04-E1A9424
There are helmets, with nubs of crayon protruding outward...
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...and there are cutlery sets, covered with globs of crayon.
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Erika Zorzi, one half of Mathery Studio, says it's meant to be the opposite of the “Please Do Not Touch“ signs seen in most museums.
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"Sometimes, the path is more interesting than the result, we want them to live in the present and to not care about doing the perfect drawing but having fun during the act, during the process.”
Photo: Mathery Studio/National Gallery of Victoria08-E1A9374
Other parts of the exhibit feature huge, spherical crayons that kids can push around on paper.
Photo: Mathery Studio/National Gallery of Victoria09-E1A9392
Other crayons are actually stationary blocks of color, where kids can rub pieces of paper against them to make colorful souvenirs.
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Mathery's approach beautifully emphasizes inclusion.
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By making it almost impossible to draw inside the lines, every visitor—even kids who might have poor motor skills or physical disabilities—gets to make their mark.
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The result is an exhibit symbiotic with its visitors.
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The kids become the artists, and get to design the space just by engaging with it. “The space exists because of the products we designed and the products wouldn’t be the same in another space,” Zorsi says. “The design of both has always been parallel.”
