About The Society of Play

The Society of Play is the artistic practice of Mark Hanlon, an artist and board game enthusiast working with the emotional language of play.

His work uses tabletop games as material rather than subject, exploring presence, ritual, and shared attention - and reflecting on what is quietly being lost in a screen-saturated world.

Board games - once central to how people gathered, focused, negotiated, and played together - become surfaces for reflection when removed from their original function.

Working with found and discarded boards, Mark creates one-off artworks through minimal graphic intervention.

The process is intentionally restrained: a quiet gesture that shifts familiar objects from play into form, while preserving traces of age, use, and history. Scuffs, wear, and imperfections are not corrected, but retained as part of each piece’s past life.

These works are not about nostalgia, parody, or fandom. They are about what play represents - slowness, physical presence, and the small human rituals that unfold around a table.

Each piece invites the viewer to pause and reconsider how attention is shared, and what is lost when shared play disappears from everyday life, as attention increasingly collapses into the tiny screens in front of us.

Alongside the original board works, the practice extends into hand-sprayed pieces and graphic prints that distil the spirit of play into simple language and form.

Together, they form an ongoing body of work titled JOY IN PLAY.

The Society of Play sits at the intersection of art, design, and tabletop culture - creating work that resonates quietly with those who recognise the value of play, whether they identify as gamers or not.

Mark has worked professionally as an artist and designer for over twenty five years, with a practice rooted in textiles, surface design, and contemporary making.

His work has included woven rugs, tapestries, wall pieces, and paintings for private clients, hotels and exhibitions across the world, focusing on storytelling, narrative, material, pattern, and structure.

He is the founder of Modersia, a bespoke rug studio creating contemporary Persian-inspired works that weave the passions, histories, and life stories of individual clients into heirloom pieces.

Alongside this, his ongoing project WARP explores abstract, sci-fi-inspired artworks - textured surfaces that contain small narrative fragments of exploration, imagined worlds, and hidden detail.

Across these practices, narrative has always been central: not illustration, but meaning embedded in form, process, and material.

Games have run quietly alongside this professional work for most of his life - from early fantasy and tabletop worlds to modern board games played around the table with friends and family.

The Society of Play brings these threads together, informed by long-term material knowledge, stort telling, studio discipline, and a genuine, lived relationship with play.

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