Drift Tricks (2024)

Drift Tricks was a skateboarding, art, and community project made for and in the city of Plymouth. Our aim was to transform Civic Square, Plymouth into a playground of creativity and playfulness, with contemplation around community resilience in the face of climate crisis. The project was conceived by me and Bedir Bekar, with the support and input of curators Lucy Elmes, and Ben Borthwick. This initiative sought to introduce skateable/playable sculptures right into the urban fabric.

The process for creating these playable/skateable sculptures was participatory, involving the PRIMEdesign youth commitee. It was a conversation and a collection of dreams and sketches, that came together through the PRIMEdesign project.

This project was all about thinking through the effects of climate change on our cities. We imagined a fictional future scenario in which an extreme weather event had blown down the iconic butterfly-shaped roof of the Civic Centre, crash landing it to the ground. We imagined that creative recyclers of the city had refashioned the roof pieces (along with the trunk of a fallen tree) into these objects for play.

While the project was supported by Plymouth Culture, we faced many problems with installing the work as planned in Civic Square, due to a shifting landscape of health and safety requirements put forward by the Council. Safety measures were agreed and then rejected, with the final proposed measures preventing public engagement with the sculptures to such an extent that we had to make the decision to not continue.

Since this initial failure, we have been exploring new opportunities for the sculptures and were delighted that Leeds Art Gallery selected the work (presented alongside Skatepark Allyship) in their exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects, curated by Lubaina Himid. The sculptures were exhibited from Jan - April 2024 for gallery visitors to play on and during their installation Welcome Skatestore and local skateboarder, Ro Elliott faciliated some skateboard sessions with communities on the pieces. The following edit was created by Josh Hallett, Leeds skateboarder and filmmaker (Inside Story Video).