MULTIMEDIA  PROJECT.

The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Cantrebury

A collaborative multimedia project by Nicola Flower, Grace Hann, Casey B, Chris Duncan, Kenny Mangena.

Commissioned as part of Playground Festival 2026, an international early years festival celebrating the creativity of our young children and families.

The Golden Time project is explores how parents and babies experience time during early parenthood.

Inspired by the “Golden Hour” after birth and the months that follow, the project reflects on a period of deep interconnectedness – when time can feel slowed, stretched, or momentarily suspended. We call this shared experience Golden Time.

Through the work with Playground, the Golden Time team have recognised that babies inhabit a different rhythm: a time of being rather than doing, free from the routines that structure adult life. To be with a baby often asks caregivers to step into this altered pace and presence.

The project draws on stories shared by parents during Baby Playground sessions. Words and phrases from these conversations reveal that while a parent or carer’s sense of time can, and does, shift in the presence of a baby, that shift can also bring tension and challenge. These insights shape the objects, films, photographs, and sound works presented as an exhibition at The Beaney.

Although parents and babies are at the heart of Golden Time, this experience is available to everyone. We are all familiar with the feeling of time speeding up and slowing down. Timelessness can be described as stepping out of regular time. Visitors to the exhibiton were invited to pause, reflect, and notice your own relationship to time as you encounter a baby’s non-linear perspective.

Golden Time Objects, Nicola Flower

As an artist and maker, I chase the magical elixir of timelessness whenever I pick up a pencil or needle and thread, tuning my brain to a place that is on the very edge of ‘no’ time. I have the same feeling when collaborating creatively with babies and watching their carers travel through a similar portal to a slower time, prompted by the immersive nature of a Playground session.

As a visual artist for Playground, I playfully select and transform everyday items and combine incongruous materials to create unconventional objects. Human experience is embedded in these common place objects; they embrace instability, imperfection, curiosity and chance. My intention is to challenge expectations, defy categories imposed by language and invite a heightened awareness which ultimately reveals the world more fully.

For Golden Time, I made objects inspired by repetition, gateways and cycles — pieces that embrace movement, sound, touch, smell, and scale — that extend the body into another space. Some objects may be unrecognisable and lend themselves to a life of their own, where openness and not knowing are encouraged. I choose and create objects that call to me, that I come across in daily life. My creative discernment matters; my choices are guided by and connect to amore universal experience. The materiality and symbolism of the colour gold permeates the objects, suggesting they have value,warmth and desirability.

As I make these objects I imagine how I may use them; but the purpose of this collection of Golden Time objects only finds true meaning and value when they are offered up to babies, carers, and artists from different disciplines. Here the objects converse with each other and bind a community together. They are now beyond my control and intention; exploration begins and a new world is shaped.

Golden Time Movement, Film and Sound, Grace Hann, Chris Duncan and Kenny Mangena

Even before language develops, parents adjust their posture, breath and pace to accommodate tiny shifts in their baby’s movement. We often see this form of communication in Playground sessions: a softening of the shoulders, a pause, a slight turn of the head. The “dance” is already happening. These responses occur before conscious awareness, pointing to an embodied intelligence that feels very familiar to me as a dancer. The films bring awareness to this subtle timing through which connection is made, and to the moment when an adult shifts into what I think of as “baby time.”

Playground creates a context for these interactions through a considered use of objects and materials. They offer an accessible invitation to engage and encourage us to experiment with scale, proximity and attention. In the films, objects become co-performers. At times they feel like extensions of my body; at others they enter into a dialogue with me. Each has its own movement language, and by attending to their qualities, I explore relationships that echo parent–baby dynamics. The intersection of sound and rhythm with movement and the way this is captured through film further shape these connections, deepening sensory interplay. Stillness and slowed tempo are central to the work. They create space for connection to be noticed, for regulation to occur, and for non-linear time to be felt.

The films capture a mix of choreographed and improvised moments. The movement does not impose but instead amplifies an alternate conception of time that is already present, through contrasting tempos, repetition, proximity, and spatial demarcation. Words taken from our conversations with parents—elation, elusive, precious, relentless, restriction, isolation—became starting points for making visible how time feels in early parenthood, and how connection is shaped moment by moment.

Golden Time Photography, Casey B

Photographic fabric panels explore a perception of the world from a baby’s perspective—viewed through the lens and fog of time, with a focus on colour and movement. Images range from raw, almost stark compositions to softly blurred, colour-suffused scenes, capturing the spectrum of visual experience. Photographed from the lowest vantage point—the plane where babies spend much of their early lives—the works emphasise the act of looking up, highlighting the way the babies encounter their environment. The panels reflect movement and visual distortion. Printed on sheer fabric, the works shift and sway, echoing the dynamic and fluid way babies perceive the world around them.

Attentiveness in everyday life

In 2024 Playground Artists delivered a Baby Playground session that was deliberately extended to 90 minutes in the exhibition space at Turner Contemporary, Margate. This experiment was to explore how a longer creative period might influence both babies and adults. Adults told us they felt more relaxed and able to move in and out of activities at their own pace. Many said the additional time allowed them to engage more deeply in creative play, and that the extended session allowed more space and opportunities for genuine co-creation. From this initial offering of a slower, more immersive experience, came the idea of Golden Time. The Golden Time project allows collaboration between artists to develop both individual and collective artistic practices, evolving the work already undertaken through Playground. Combining artforms was essential to realising the vision. Sound draws attention to the subtleties in movement, while movement reframes how objects are perceived. Photography and film capture the essence of an otherwise transient experience, deepening the impact of the work and inviting new directions for exploration.

Throughout the project, the artists have endeavoured to hold parents’ and carers’ perspectives alongside those of the babies, giving equal value to multiple voices. By including the voices of parents and carers, we illuminate the babies’ sense of timelessness through contrast, thereby exploring how the baby’s experience of time can meaningfully inform our own.

We use creativity as a way for audiences to encounter this different relationship to and with time. Through this approach, we hope to empower audiences to reconnect with their own creativity, encouraging greater presence in, and attentiveness to, the seemingly ordinary yet joyous moments of everyday life.

The Golden Time exhibition was accompanied by two Golden Time baby sessions………

Playground is a partnership between Kent County Council’s Culture and Creative Economy Service and Kent Libraries and achieved National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status with Arts Council England in April 2023.

Thank you to Baby Playground participants at Dartford Library and Snodland Library.