Balloons have been popular with event organisers for some time: they fill a lot of space, cheaply. They remind your guests that they were once kids, which makes them happy and a little silly, and people don't seem to mind the smell of the latex or the inevitable static. Specialist suppliers can deliver balloons up to 6ft+ in diameter (though do watch out for them indoors, I've seen one take out a chandelier), so you can achieve really dramatic swipes of colour and contrasting scales.
Martin Creed's Half the air in a given space showed at the Hayward recently - people queued for hours to step inside. It was a surprisingly claustrophobic experience, with the balloons liberally coated in people's hair and bits of fluff. But it was also an amazing photo opportunity, so team Teatime loved it. Except for Polly, who was totally squicked out and left, but you can't please everyone all the time.
William Forsythe's Scattered Crowd (most recently shown in Buenos Aires in 2014) is a more sedate piece, less of a frenetic whirl of excitement and more a dreamy walk through a sea of bubbles.
By contrast several of Yayoi Kusama's installation works feature giant polka dotted spheres in bright colours, often with mirrors used to give a greater sense of depth and space, for example Dots Obsession - Love Transformed into Dots.
While on the subject of balloons we should also give an honourable mention to Charles Petillon's recent installation at Covent Garden. While you couldn't exactly play with/in it, it was certainly a playful use of materials and available space.
Moving on to smaller spheres, there has been a bit of an obsession with ball pits lately. Yes, those childhood favourites which have emotionally and physically scarred many parents forced to fish around at the bottom of one for their errant child. Creative agency Pearlfisher was first off the mark in January with charity effort Jump In, featuring 81,00 large white plastic balls.
They were one-upped by Snarkitecture over the summer with The Beach, located in the (very) grand hall of the National Building Museum in Washington DC, taking up 10,000 square feet and containing nearly a million clear recyclable balls.
Which brings us to the tiddly-widdliest of spheres: bubbles. We don't like bubbles much, for health and safety reasons (they make floors super slippy) and also because they remind us of foam parties. But they do still have the power to work on an impressive scale in rather a transgressive, invasive way that's quite appealing. Case in point: Michel Blazy's foam installations in a cistercian monastery in France, entitled Bouquet Final.
Another notable example is Kohei Nawa's exhibition in Aichi, Japan. Basically a big dark room full of bubbles fixed with glycerin, the scale of the work is truly impressive.
And with that we complete our round up of balls, bubbles and balloons. Next up: fun furniture...
