Much of Vivian Lynn’s art was driven by her desire to challenge and disrupt the established order. Here, she has used the analogy of a children’s playground to critique the repressive society she saw around her in 1970s Aotearoa New Zealand. The figures playing here are not young and the games they play are not carefree. Instead they are grotesque automatons, imprisoned within a system of conformity. It’s an unexpectedly dystopian vision, in which people follow the roles assigned to them without question or agency; mere cogs in an endlessly spinning wheel with no possibility of escape.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)