AS A CHILD, she liked to slide in mud, jump into haystacks, make her own fun.
Today, if she wants to play, Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam can just make her own equipment.
Playgrounds of mesh and imagination that are as intricate and original as the contemporary artist’s own life.
Spaces of colour and creativity she crochets by hand so the fancies of other children can fly.
The Japan-native-turned-Bridgetown-resident is a well-known contemporary textile artist in her home country. Her artwork has been shown in top museums.
Her massive crocheted playgrounds are the centrepieces of national and other parks. And smaller versions are captivating kids in other areas of Japan and beyond.
Today, married to Nova Scotia native and fellow artist Charles MacAdam, she teaches fashion at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design while working on the visions that first came to her “three-dimensional” mind 40 years ago.
“It’s my instinct,” the 72-year-old artist says of the complex nylon play nets that can take as many twists and turns as her own journey, from the ravages of war to the upper echelons of New York design and her explorations of dozens of other cities across the globe.
The daughter of a doctor, she started her life in Japan. But her father moved her family to Japanese-occupied Manchuria during the Second World War, opening a hospital in the country later invaded by the Soviet Union.
When the Russians took over in 1945, they also occupied her father’s home and the hospital he’d founded.
Her family eventually fled the region by cattle car and by foot. And while she was only five at the time, Horiuchi MacAdam vividly recalls the death and deprivation of those days more than six decades ago.
“This experience changed all my life … because I was five and I had to face many, many deaths of the people in the war,” she says through a still-thick accent, often aided in English by her husband.
“The Russians were coming in and the Japanese were defeated and so everybody who was a Japanese national was essentially a refugee. A lot were killed. There’s a lot of chaos at that time.
“Then after the war, we returned to Japan. It’s a long journey without food, sleeping in the field. And I survived. Many people died.”
Back in Japan, Horiuchi MacAdam eventually went to art school and later received her master of fine arts degree from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
She worked for a top textile designer in New York and from there travelled the world, taught at American and Japanese universities, and travelled back and forth to her home country, where her textile designs have graced everything from subways seats to galleries and museums.
One of her early museum installations, a small, crocheted structure, inadvertently inspired the idea for the play nets that sometimes take her a year or more to make with the wooden hooks she fashions out of dowel.
Back then, as she was setting up her museum piece, a couple of children found their own use for the design, which set her on a path that now includes the business Interplay Design and Manufacturing (netplayworks.com) that she and her husband operate out of Bridgetown.
“I made it and we hung it, awaiting all these customers … and then (children) they are excited, they are just crawling inside and then suddenly I realized what I was making,” she recalls, sitting outside her NSCAD studio on an unusually warm November day.
“I think I was making for children, that I did not know. Then I was so excited and this is beyond the museum, you know. This is far more important.”
The revelation started her years-long research into the state of recreational areas in Japan. She found that while the country’s economy flourished, children in urban areas had fewer places to play.
“Children are stuck in high buildings and couldn’t do anything and watching TV, then I started writing (that) this is no good. As a woman, if I want to have children, we should do something.”
Years later, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the artist did do something that attracted the attention of others — large, eye-catching playgrounds for a major memorial park and an open-air museum in Japan.
Her indoor and outdoor creations have flourished since. They’re in places like China and Korea and Spain.
The couple takes on commissioned projects from its Bridgetown business, making the larger “air pocket” structures she crochets by hand or the smaller machine-knotted “space net” designs that are more squarish.
They’re now designing a small net playground they hope to install in Bridgetown next spring.
Children are drawn to these spider web-like, springy structures because they can roam free, take “managed risks” and let their imaginations soar, the couple says.
They’ve watched many kids joyfully crawling or bouncing through the thick, safety-tested nylon they compare to waves on air, sea in sky.
“It’s very elastic and stretchy,” says MacAdam, who studied at NSCAD, where he first heard of the woman he later met in Japan.
If one child moves, “it makes this sort of wave-like motion throughout the net so everybody gets lifted. It's like being at sea, bobbing at sea.”
The larger, hand-made creations have an added dimension of “exploration,” MacAdam says. Kids can pretend they’re in a house or a cocoon or whatever else comes to mind.
“(You) go up and up and up,” Horiuchi MacAdam adds, smiling, hands spiralling. “And you’re coming up through these holes.”
“And you climb through pouch to pouch to pouch,” MacAdam continues. “And you come up to the top and at the top is this big open area and kids pop up and drop down, they can disappear, they can pop out of nowhere. They slide. They do somersaults.”
Horiuchi MacAdam imagines these movements, kids squealing and playing, when she’s “zoning” for hours at a time, creating her meshy marvels.
“I’m in another world,” the mother of one says with a laugh. “Then I get hungry and I come back (to the) real world.
“It’s hard, but it’s fun using my imagination.”
And when she’s finished, kids can use theirs.
“(Children) need a place to play, and not just a swing and a slide. These (things) are already decided, how to play,” she says.
“No — make a space and (let) kids decide.”