Oakland resident Kelly Wainwright, founder of the creative agency, Messy Monkey Arts, has been, as she puts it, “playing with play” for a while. This has included having corporate employees do things like jump rope at Pier 17 in San Francisco or hop on balls in the middle of Market Street. 

“I wanted to take it to a much grander scale,” she said. “Instead of 10 people jumping on balls, I wanted 10,000 people jumping on balls.”

Wainwright started getting some friends together to make some of the images in her head a reality – in a kind of merging of flash mob and instant installation.

“It really was like a light went off and I felt like this was what I was put on earth to do,” she said.

The idea came to Wainwright while she was still in the Bay Area, but she soon moved to Cape Town, South Africa, with her husband. She worked with a few photographers there on the project, PlayJumpEat. Many of the images are of people jumping on a bed.

“I think it’s simple and refreshing – everyone can relate to it,” Wainwright said. “I would just take the bed around to different places and invite people to jump on it. It feels like breaking the rules, but really, what harm is done? It’s bringing back simple play, like ‘Come on the bed with your shoes on even! Come on, I dare you.’”

One of the people Wainwright dared to jump on the bed was activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“We were shooting in a soup kitchen in a rough neighborhood and we came home and there was a message from Desmond Tutu’s personal assistant saying he would do it,” she said. “It just took one phone call.”

Some of the proceeds from sales of the prints go to a dance school, the Tertia Kindo Arts Project. Wainwright said she thinks having the money benefit kids in a rough neighborhood in Cape Town is one reason someone with a hectic schedule like Tutu would agree to jump on the bed for art. He asked to jump with some of the kids from the school, who enthusiastically obliged.

Just back from Cape Town, Wainwright said she wants to make more photographs with an eye toward putting together a book. Trained as an architect, she says play has been a driving force in her life.

“Being there felt like being 3 years old to me,” Wainwright said about studying architecture. “In a sense, it’s very play-based, in that you’re constantly having to think outside the box. I was like, ‘You mean, you can draw that girl’s hair like this, it doesn’t have to be like this?’ It blew my mind.”

Wainwright knew working at a firm was not for her, and she quit her job and began selling apples in front of the firm. Then she started painting signs for the apples and eventually decided to teach art to children. She wanted to have the kids work with different materials like brooms and peanut butter rather than paint and a brush. But adults, as well as children, expressed interest in the classes. This delighted her.

“I’m really into juxtaposition,” she said. “It’s not so unheard of having kids painting with peanut butter, but to have 50-year-olds doing it is a little crazier.”

The importance of play in everyone’s life – from 5- to 50-year-olds – is something Wainwright is adamant about.

“Play has something to do with consciousness. It’s easy to forget we have a pulse. We need to pay our health insurance and we need to keep our jobs, or we need to get a certain outfit and we become dead,” she said. “Play helps remind us of the meaning of life. It’s like a wake up call or a slap in the face that we’re actually alive. We’re humans, not robots.”

Wainwright’s work has been showing at a Cape Town gallery, but she wants to bring the show to the states. Right now, a big focus, along with the baby she’s having in October, is getting talk show queen Oprah Winfrey to jump on the bed.

“Oprah makes sense,” she said. “She’s into joy, play, abundance, charity and South Africa.”