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Exhibition spaces can sometimes feel sterile and intimidating, or even controlling. We internalise specific ways to move around in a gallery, treading carefully so as not to break priceless artworks or social conventions. But for Brighton based artist duo Leap Then Look (Bill Leslie and Lucy Cran), spaces are made to be broken down and rebuilt, and to work for us how we need them to.

In their recent exhibition Play Interact Explore at Towner Eastbourne, Leap Then Look encouraged us to engage by, well... Playing, Interacting and Exploring. Just walking around in this exhibition wouldn't make sense - you have to use your hands, get down on the floor, peer into holes, look under tables. When you enter Play Interact Explore, it's you who's in control.

Eva Jonas, an Associate Artist for the exhibition, has spoken at Towner before about ways of moving around spaces. Eva lets body, senses and instincts take control of movements, allowing a more organic connection with art and artists that develops through our own creativities.

Just ahead of the final weekend of Play Interact Explore, Eva hosted a workshop with Downs View Link college for young people with special educational needs and disabilities, inviting them to make the space their own. Children and adults from Downs View Link were one of four community groups (also including West Rise Junior School, Arts in Mind and the Brighton and Hove Foster Service) who had worked with Leap Then Look to explore, test and develop creative strategies and ideas for the exhibition.

Eva asked the students to think about ways of moving through the exhibition. What about swimming? Moving their arms as well as their feet was freeing and exciting but weird! They laughed, pushing invisible waves out the way. We don't have to do straight lines. Weaving and bobbing, they got a closer look at all the different things there were to do. So many places to hide and jump out of!

The students headed to the 'sculpture playground' area of the exhibition, with Eva challenging them to build a kind of fortress so they couldn't be found. Some of them preferred to find existing hidey-holes, sitting under tables or crawling between structures. There are so many ways to look at this place. From above, from down below, from in-between.

Although Eva made suggestions, the students were encouraged to feel things out by themselves; to see what was fun and what felt good. Lots of them loved playing in front of the projector screen, realising that they could see each other's shadows dancing on the opposite side. Jaz looked at one of her school friends' stretched-out sillhouettes, and laughing at the wacky proportions, she was reminded of Wilmington's Long Man, a chalk drawing in the landscape that the school bus had driven past on the way down. Behind the screen, they could be big or small, tall or short, scary or funny...

Another experiment was Eva's desire paths. She asked that everyone think about their favourite part of the exhibition, and choose a colour of tape. The students worked together to make a line with the tape that lead all the way from the door to a special place, marking it with an initial. It was cool to see where the lines of tape interacted, weaving and intersecting before splitting apart again. After they made their own paths, the students chose a different line to follow. Pretending they were tightropes, balancing and thinking about new ways to move, they didn't know where they would end up!

Next, the students tried a very tactile approach to collaboration, getting in pairs and holding one end of a piece of string each. They had to stay together and see where they might lead each other. Who is following who? Who is leading who? How do we work as a team?

At the end of the session, it was time to do some drawing. Eva printed polaroids of the students in their hiding places, which helped them to do drawings of the space, thinking about looking at it from above like birds or planes. Bill said, think about what shapes there are in the space. Some students realised they could use bits of tape on the paper as well as pencils. They created shapes that could be paths, or paths that could be shapes. Charlize said, I could hide behind the tape, if I was on the page. It was fun to see photos of what they had just been doing. Everyone was really excited to take their pieces home.