Image credit: Photo taken by John Devlin, Glasgow (2024) Ontmoet Lilian Ptáček, de nieuwe ontwerpster van de Jonge Makers Studio 2025
For the 3rd edition of the Young Makers Studio, we welcome Lilian Ptáček who will design a new artistic educational space at Framer Framed in 2025. The Young Makers Studio offers an inviting learning environment for young children to conduct their own research and experiment creatively with various (natural) materials. Encouraging children to experience autonomy and control their own learning process. Ptáček is a visual artist and educator who recently graduated from the Master Fine Art programme at Piet Zwart Institute. Her work spans sculpture, installation, printmaking and sound, exploring ideas of inward and outward, of public and private in relation to the human body and urban environments.
Interview and text by: Idil Samatar
Congratulations on being selected as the designer for Framer Framed’s educational space, the Young Maker’s Studio. You will create a space for children aged 4 and up, and assist them in exploring, playing and experimenting in the Young Makers Studio. Are you excited to start?
Yeah, I’m very excited. It really stood out to me as an open call as a very distinct thing. I’ve never really seen something like it before. So yeah, I’m intrigued to see what the possibilities are with it, and yeah very excited.
Can you introduce yourself to the Framer Framed community?
My name is Lilian Ptáček, I’m a visual artist and educator based in Rotterdam. A lot of my work considers or explores the daily demands of city living. Often even drawing upon my own experiences, growing up in different cities, or kind of my surroundings and thinking about moving from a place of this idea that inhabiting the world through the body. So there’s often this combination of bodily forms with urban settings and the collapsing of these two things into each other. I work across sculpture, installation, sound and printmaking. It’s a mixed-media practice.
You are a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Art Programme at Piet Zwart and are now embarking on a new journey. Previously, you studied in the UK and have now settled in the Netherlands. How has that transition been for you as an artist?
I think it was a really exciting step for me to study at Piet Zwart’s, particularly because it’s such an international community. I had been a practising artist for a few years in Glasgow and working as an educator. When I came to Piet Zwart’s it was really interesting to realise what it meant to work and make art in an international community. You have to kind of understand what it means to communicate to people who might not have the same references as you, and we really questioned who our audience was. The training in education itself was so different from my education.
From the one in Glasgow?
Yeah, Glasgow is very material-centred. I studied painting and printmaking, so it was very much a lot of learning methodologies and ways of working. It taught me how to make, and I could develop a lot of skills in physically making things. I feel like I came here, and I learned how to think. It was a much more kind of theoretical course to a certain extent, but also it’s still really open and there’s still very much playfulness within that. It felt like a very different focus, a lot more how we worked as a group of individuals and it was a lot more language-based than in my previous studies, which was more material-based. So it was interesting to see those differences.
In the Netherlands, it’s more based on a theoretical approach, and in your previous education, it was more of a practical approach.
Yes, and they sit together for me. I think through and across them, and there isn’t necessarily a hierarchy between them, but that was nice to have. Just to learn from a different educational approach as well, and there was still definitely a very openness to the education at Piet Zwart’s. For example, we did seminars on performance, which isn’t necessarily my background either. We did a whole seminar on colour theory, where we made natural dyes.
In Glasgow you were commissioned to create a piece for a community centre, can you explain the piece you made for them?
That was a project back in 2020, which was a collaborative project with a good friend of mine Poppy Nash who’s a designer. We were invited to create some artwork for their space, and the idea was to kind of reflect the different kinds of voices of the community. What we ended up doing was a series of different workshops, some of them were printmaking workshops, collage workshops and clay workshops. We worked with these different groups that were already using the community centres. We made a wallpaper piece that incorporated a lot of texts that they had created or that they had told us in the interviews. It’s quite a layered dense visual piece that was also text-based. It had these kind of stories in it.
You managed to capture stories and engage the people of the community centre in the piece, which is quite similar to the Young Makers Studio. However, this time you will work with kids in mind. What are your thoughts on that?
My idea is centred around play, and a lot of experiences I’ve had in teaching and my own approach to education. Play is something I find really important in education, particularly with children but also with adults. Also, in my own practice. I’m very inspired by Sister Corita Kent who’s a screen printer from the 70s. She was an educator, and she made these beautiful screen prints that incorporate the world around her. She talks a lot about play, and for her play is a way of transitioning into work. I was quite inspired by that for the proposal I wrote, and I want to make sure that children feel that they’re in an environment that they are familiar with. So it doesn’t have this pressure of being like a studio. I think it (a studio) can also feel like a space that people don’t necessarily feel welcome in, so it’s like showing that there is that space also for them. Also, I find that play can, in a way, feel almost like a safe space to experiment and explore – push the boundaries of ideas and things. So that is essential to it.
The concept itself at the moment, although I’m sure it will develop through the design phase, is taking this idea of a cardboard box. If I were gifted something as a kid I’d be much more excited in the cardboard. I think that has actually remained still in my practice. I collect the cardboard packaging of almost everything that comes through my kitchen, and it always ends up in my studio finding a new purpose. At the moment, the design is going to be centred around this idea of the cardboard box, and they have this invitation to transform it into something else.
This leads me to the next question, you have proposed Tiny Forts and Tall Tales for the Young Makers Studio. Can you give us some insight into this concept?
The idea at the moment is to create a studio that is also a fort. So again, this idea of play where children are invited to create their own kind of dioramas that can be slotted into the fort, and that the fort itself can evolve and change. They’ll be able to explore working with cardboard to create and explore world-building. There’ll also be a chance to explore more performative elements. Imagining there is a stage, I can also think about puppets and telling of stories and how to kind of bring that into it, which is also central to play as well as making. I’m imagining a drawing observational area within the fort so that there’s a quieter space for them to observe the world around them. That’s also something that’s quite key to a lot of the education I do. It’s like thinking about how the world around can be a source of inspiration, and just like working from the everyday as a starting point. Because that is something I found helps break down a lot of what art is, and that can also start from the simplest thing in your home, like a cardboard box.
Do you often use repurposed materials?
Yeah, I have been doing that in my practice for a few years now. It initially began because I was doing a lot of printmaking where you end up with lots of prints. I often approach printmaking like painting. So I end up maybe only having one at the end, but I still have the process of generating quite a few to get that one. So I started making my own paper, and recycling it down, and then the paper isn’t very generic. It has a form and a texture, and it is quite sculptural. Also, working with everyday objects, what does it mean to reclaim and reposition things in my work anyway? I think young kids do that, it’s a part of imagination, right? To take something and to rethink what it can be. So yeah, it felt like a good opportunity to do that. It’s important for me to find ways to make my practice more sustainable, and bring that into projects that I do as well.
You draw inspiration from the London Post-War adventure playground for the Tiny Forts and Tall Tales concept. What is the historical background of these playgrounds?
After the Second World War, there were a lot of sites that had been bombed in London. I think in the 50s they were starting to repurpose them into other things. One thing that started happening was they started building playgrounds on them. So they could take a lot of found objects and materials, and build these playgrounds. At the centre of it the children themselves would help build them. They looked very unsafe, but some of them still kind of remained when I was a kid growing up in London. There was a real sense of building a fort or letting the kids be very involved in what shape they would take and repurposing materials from around them – play being really at the centre of that. I remember going back to them, and they’ve been renovated more like a contemporary playground. I think there’s something about bringing that into the project. First of all, having the sense of a thought or an environment that feels like play, but then also what can it mean to invite someone into a space where they get a chance to shape that? I think that was central to the playground idea, which is a challenge. How do you do that safely, and how do you do that, especially with 4-year-olds? That’s something I’m definitely going to be exploring, but I think there’s something powerful about that where you can trust that children can shape the world around them and give them that experience.
It’s interesting how they included the children in redefining that space.
Definitely, they’re quite amazing seeing some of the early ones. Seeing some of the pictures of them, and that they stayed all that time. Also, there’s this invitation to use the space in that way to bring some sort of joy back into those spaces.
Framer Framed believes in creating art outside of educational and institutional structures, and in learning through sharing exchanges of perspectives and experiences by focusing not only on learning but also on unlearning. How will you approach this method as an educator in the Young Makers Studio?
That’s something that’s been quite central to a lot of the reading I’ve been doing around education in the last few years. My experience at Piet Zwart’s had a lot of those ideas embedded into their education. I think it’s about approaching it from this idea of not saying what’s necessary and not being too prescriptive about what happens, but providing a certain amount of tools. Let there be enough space for people to come in with whatever they’re bringing into it. It’s not just a top-down experience that you’re learning from the lessons that they are in. That comes from a certain amount of letting go and just trusting. It’s about structuring or providing certain tools and frameworks, but also allowing there to be enough space within that to shape their own perspectives and ideas around things.
What experiences do you hope the children get from Tiny Forts and Tall Tales?
It feels like a space they can play and experiment in, and they get a chance to play with lots of different materials. I think working collectively and collaboratively would be beautiful to see, and how you can facilitate that in a space. That they’ve added, contributed, or changed and adjusted the space so that there is a sense of them being involved in the building of it. I’m curious what the experience is like for them, and how that would change over all the different school visits, so it’ll be a quite evolving space that it’s not fixed.
Interview and text by: Idil Samatar
The Young Maker’s Studio will be open for school visits in March 2025.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
Amsterdam Oost / Educatie /
Netwerk
