"Children, through play, imagine an ideal scenario where the necessary materials for a game have been rewritten, made malleable. Many of us have noticed that when a child receives a toy as a gift they are often drawn instead to the box that it comes in, the string, the wrapping paper. The rebuke of the intended gift can be read as a message sent from one world to another. In the adult world materials are often forgotten in the process of becoming something else (a gift, for example). In the world of the child any material touched by the imagination retains its materiality whilst becoming something else, and the less complicated the material the more quickly it can be put to use, start talking and listening, be assimilated into a game, reworked as a tool or a vehicle, or kept as a treasure to protect and be protected by. Like dreams (let us ignore Freud for a moment) these imaginations are a form of knowledge that shelters the non-rational from the rational, and Milledge’s paintings often aim for a similar experience. When an object is imbued with this imagination, it too resists easy interpretation, and need not be experienced in a particular order."