Artist collective Leap Then Look open an interactive exhibition at Tramway on 26 September, inviting visitors to play, build and perform with art as part of the experience.
Visitors to Glasgow’s Tramway this autumn will be encouraged not just to look at art, but to pick it up, move it around and join in the act of making. Play Interact Explore, a new exhibition by artist collective Leap Then Look, opens on 26 September and runs until the end of the year.
The show offers a gallery space where audiences can touch, rearrange and combine sculptural objects, turning a conventional exhibition into a form of live participation. Large and small-scale assemblages in bright colours and tactile materials can be stacked, rocked or rolled. Photographs and performances will emerge spontaneously as visitors reconfigure the works.
For co-founders Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie, who formed Leap Then Look in 2019, the exhibition extends their conviction that art should be experienced as an active process. Their practice crosses sculpture, photography, performance and installation, but always with interaction at its heart.
“Being able to work in this way and reflect on our experiences and our participants’ responses allowed us to create a space which we felt was full of possibilities…”
Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie
Art as performance
The premise behind Play Interact Explore is simple: the exhibition is not complete without its audience. In place of objects held at a distance, the space is filled with modular works designed to be touched and altered. The result is a shifting installation in which visitors generate the choreography, and the gallery becomes a stage.
Cran and Leslie describe the approach as rooted in play. “We created different layers and levels, with the hope of allowing people of different ages, experiences, physical and neuro-differences to explore the space in ways they felt engaging,” they explain. What might look like children’s play equipment doubles as sculptural material; what starts as a rearrangement of objects becomes, in effect, a performance.
The link with theatre is explicit. The show was built in collaboration with community groups across the UK, and the process of co-creation informed the final design. The collective view art and theatre as continuous practices: spaces where participants gather, experiment, and generate meaning together.
From community workshops to Tramway
Leap Then Look have developed projects with major institutions from the Royal Academy of Arts to Turner Contemporary, but Play Interact Explore takes shape directly from workshops held in Eastbourne, Brighton and elsewhere. Working with schools and community groups, the artists tested how participants interacted with materials, which in turn shaped the sculptural vocabulary of the show.
The result is both exhibition and social space. At Tramway, the works will be handled by thousands of visitors over the course of its run. No two visits will look the same: the objects are in constant flux, and the audience is implicated as performer.
This focus on process reflects a wider ambition. As Cran and Leslie put it, the aim is to make contemporary art accessible “for many people for whom art galleries are not a place they necessarily feel at home in.” The gallery is presented less as a place of authority than as a sandbox for exploration.
A Glasgow stage
The choice of Tramway, a venue known equally for visual art and performance, makes sense. Once a tram depot and now an international arts centre, Tramway has long blurred boundaries between art forms. By hosting Play Interact Explore, it places a participatory project within a context already shaped by theatre and dance.
The exhibition sits alongside Tramway’s wider programme of free exhibitions and live events, supported by Creative Scotland and managed by Glasgow Life. That context reinforces the idea of Play Interact Explore as something between exhibition and public performance, bridging disciplines while inviting audiences into the middle of the action.
On the opening day, Friday 26 September, Cran and Leslie will give an artists’ talk at 6pm, discussing their approach to participation, play and public space.
Play as philosophy
Underlying the project is a philosophy: that play is not trivial, but a mode of thinking. Leap Then Look argue that playful making and looking can unlock curiosity across ages and abilities, enabling participants to encounter art without the intimidation sometimes associated with gallery spaces.
That principle informs their work in schools, universities and community groups, where they encourage experimentation across media. By translating those workshops into a gallery-scale installation, they make the argument that participation belongs at the centre of cultural life, not at its margins.
Supported and sustained
Play Interact Explore is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, with Tramway’s exhibition programme funded by Creative Scotland. The project builds on a track record that has seen Leap Then Look work with partners ranging from Tate and the National Gallery to Glyndebourne and the London Festival of Architecture.
Their reputation rests not only on the objects they produce but on the experiences they design. By giving audiences the tools to interact, they dissolve the line between artist and spectator.
Why it matters
In recent years, galleries and theatres alike have sought ways to draw audiences into more active forms of participation. Play Interact Explore suggests that those ambitions need not be separate: the gallery can function as stage, and interaction can be understood as a form of performance.
For Glasgow, the exhibition arrives at a time when Tramway continues to assert itself as a space where art and performance cohabit. For Leap Then Look, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that participatory practice can be ambitious and accessible, designed for everyone from schoolchildren to seasoned gallery-goers.
And for audiences, it is an invitation: to move, to build, to play—and in doing so, to become part of the exhibition itself.
All Images: Hugh Fox
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