Splint

Toy Tool, process (2000 - 2004) Splint was a roving toolkit for public invention — part sculpture, part playground, part club. It began as a crude stick-and-rope compass but evolved into a refined set of handmade, mathematically-scaled components: marker discs, tension straps, canvas mats, modular poles and plotting tools — all carried in a leather harness like an old-world surveyor. Designed to geometrically define space without prescribing its use, Splint asked a simple question: What happens when you give people the means to play, but not the rules?

From laneways to beaches, gallery courtyards to protest sites, Splint was activated through a process of structured improvisation. The artist would arrive, lay out the kit, and invite anyone to join — strangers, passers-by, collaborators, kids. Games would be invented, discarded, remixed. Obstacle courses, sand drawings, shelters, rituals, riggings, urban navigations. Some sessions lasted minutes. Others ran for 36 hours, rambling through cities with rolling logbooks and shifting participants.

The project resisted fixed form. Instead, it embraced the social glue of shared invention — the invisible negotiation between strangers that makes a system live. Splint’s strength was in its fluid structure: precise enough to enable action, loose enough to remain open-ended. Each component was both boundary and invitation — a plotting tool, a toy, a conversation starter.

Over time, Splint became a platform: a modular system for exploring how space, play, and agency intersect. It was adopted in performance festivals, schools, design labs and informal urban experiments. Maling described it as “a tool in search of purpose,” constantly reshaped by those who used it. It built a quiet community bonded by participation, drift, and the shared pleasure of making something up together.