This presentation aims to broaden research of children’s culture and sustainability by treating the visual arts in an educational environment, namely Sofia Sundberg's play sculptures at a Swedish preschool. Place for life and place to grow are the project’s governing principles, to be inaugurated in February 2023. The sculptures are designed to become bearers of life by promoting biological diversity. The sculptures differ therefore from traditional play sculptures that since modernism are experience-based (Druker 2008). For one sculpture, the artist also creates a book dedicated to story time.

During the presentation, the artist relates the idea, the artworks, preparations, inauguration and collaboration with the municipality and school. Anette Almgren White contributes with a theoretical anchoring in ecocriticism, intermediality and children's perspective by exploring approaches to the environment, sustainability and collaboration between man, animal, and nature the sculptures encourage. Useful concepts in this context are ecoliteracy and cross-species solidarity to understand the interdependent relations. (Almgren White 2020).

The perspective includes, in addition to the visual arts works, the collaboration between sculpture and book in relation to sustainability in materials, the importance of place, young children's meaning-making and the preschool's pedagogical mission (Skaret 2014, Hvit Lindstrand 2015, Lpfö18 (Skolverket).