The gallery space is draped in textiles onto which bright paint marks, drawn shapes, figures and faces have been printed. Gathered on the floor, on a colourful quilt scattered with cushions, people of all ages make use of pastels, felt tips, pencils and watercolour paint on squares of paper that are then affixed to the drapery. Jars of water and paint brushes are dotted around, and a digital printer-copier sits within reach. A set of sixteen works on paper catch my eye, their rich jewel tones standing out against the white paper, where deep and broad swathes of watercolour pool upon skinny lines of automatic drawing. On the adjoining wall there is a delicate, framed work that draws my attention. What holds my gaze is the dance of small surging and scattered marks, zings of line, spacing and colour. One of its titles (as I later learn in conversation with the artists) is ‘Rainbow’.
Art is Ours, Mine and Yours! Assunta and Lou Art Club at Bloc Projects, Sheffield brings together work by Nottingham-based artists Lou Dallyn, her mother Assunta Ruocco, and the friends and participants who have passed through their studio and workshops. Lou and Assunta’s work together began in the 2020 lockdown, when Assunta’s home studio needed to become a space for both art and childcare. Unable to work independently, Assunta began working with Lou, who was then four years old. Or more precisely for Assunta, who is attentive to such dynamics, she began assisting Lou as an artist. The practice that evolved involves printing, painting, drawing and collage, in intuitively layered interventions that make imaginative use of their household scanner and printer.
It is a gorgeous, joyous and tender exhibition that shows the riches that come from children’s art work, long term collaboration and group work, staged in a beautifully imagined and welcoming space. Alongside the exhibition, a series of half-term workshops invited children and their carers into the space to make their own work, which was then included in the show. There was also a symposium, Making Room for Children and Art, delivered in conjunction with Bloc Projects, Millennium Gallery and the Art Working Parents Alliance. Almost eighty people of all ages gathered at the Millennium Gallery during May half-term to explore questions around intergenerational collaboration and what support is needed for artist-parents.
A key work presented in the exhibition is ‘16 Variants on an Automatic Drawing’ (2020), comprising sixteen versions developed from one print. The base work is Assunta’s automatic line drawing, augmented with further cut out pieces and colouring by Lou, which was then scanned and printed many times. Getting the printout to survive being painted on was not easy. On the wrong stock, the printed line dissolves under wet colour, so Assunta worked through boxes of watercolour and other paper samples until she found paper that would hold both the printed line and Lou’s watery interventions. Lou painted over each of them, working fast, making a division of artistic labour in which the artist-parent lays the ground and the artist-child spreads out onto the surface.
In the histories of art, a child and her mother are more likely to be known as the subject of an image than its maker. Working against this assumption, Assunta and Lou do even more than turn this ideological convention on its head – their work together expands generously beyond their dyad to include other children and their carers, in turn opening up the possibility of meaningful intergenerational collaboration beyond a familial structure. The workshops with others began in spring 2024, when their practice grew to become the Assunta and Lou Art Club, a transportable participatory studio and workshop developed by the duo to invite others into the process. This had been prompted by Lou, who said she wanted to teach other children. In these workshops, a quilt, cushions and aprons printed with their drawings, alongside a digital printer-copier and paints, pastels and pens, let visitors take up the methods Assunta and Lou have evolved together. On my visit to the exhibition at Bloc Projects, Assunta points out to me with great admiration the work of others embedded within the show, whether on the wall or printed onto cushions and aprons. When I talk with Lou, she asks whether I will bring my son to their workshops, and reassures me that they have special paints and crayons for little ones.
Assunta’s research and practice have often been concerned with how situated forms of collaboration, support and care can question established forms of authorship, exploring the politics of reproductive labour, configurations of domestic space and the institutional and social arrangements that impinge on the possibility of creative work and creative lives. Her work with Lou draws on other projects, such as the Sojourn Project Space, where Assunta invites artists whose work interests her to spend time together, and explores what her own support, skills and equipment might do for theirs. Some of her past projects have also explored the articulation of the studio space within its material and social confines. Vertical Studio (2011-2018) stays formless until someone activates it, and Collapsible Painting Studio (2019-present) leans into constraints of space to make paintings that nest and stack on top of one another: flexible and portable, attentive to space, time and adaptability. Elsewhere, she has written critically about the home/studio as a site for art practice and (child)care work.[1]
For Lou, what began as a supported creative practice aged four, predominantly doing work on paper, supported by her mother and intervening in work begun by her, has stretched into a desire to teach others. Recently, at an open studio at Primary in Nottingham, a friend asked whether she could have an exhibition and Lou stepped up as curator, even hammering the drawings to the wall herself, the first time she had used a hammer. ‘I felt like I had the power,’ she says.
In conversation, she is a charismatic artist with a discerning eye for what is good and for what is not. ‘I have some that I hate and I never want to show people,’ she says of her own paintings. Her mother ‘tells me to show them to everybody and I’m like, no!’ Adults, she explains, are the problem, because they do not know what is ‘cool or bad’. Is it hard, working with people like that? ‘It’s a hard job,’ she tells me.
Of course, a practice such as this, sensitively built around a child’s autonomy and creativity, also has to incorporate the days they opt out. Of the three workshops held at Bloc Projects, Lou mainly co-facilitated the final one. For the first two she wanted to explore the building and play hide and seek, with an access support worker on hand so that she could step away from the activities. Considering the exhibition through this lens, I am reminded that the kind of democratising of art that the exhibition’s title (Art is Ours, Mine and Yours!) alludes to is not often one extended to children. In 1970, the radical feminist writer, activist and trained artist Shulamith Firestone argued in her pathbreaking book The Dialectic of Sex that childhood is not a natural condition but a modern invention. For Firestone, a separate world built for children with their own toys, their own books and their own pictures is segregation rather than protection. Five years later, the psychiatrists Chester Pierce and Gail Allen named the prejudice ‘childism’: ‘the automatic assumption of superiority of any adult over any child.’[2] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl revived the term in her 2012 book Childism to argue that this bias is structural, like racism or sexism. Under capitalism, children are not so much the subjects of history as the property of parents, theirs to be shaped. In her 2025 book Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley puts it well: ‘even in its idealization of children, this world is against children.’ Children are routinely praised as so-called ‘natural’ artists yet denied the status of actual ones, their contributions framed as raw material for adult use. Assunta and Lou’s achievements contribute to this long lineage of anti-childist thought by addressing questions like: what is a child’s perspective on the making process? And what are the spaces, then, for children?
There is a broader cultural and curatorial context to these questions that Lou and Assunta’s work speaks to. The figure of the mother as artist has gathered, by now, considerable attention. Consider Mary Kelly’s pathbreaking ‘Post-Partum Document’ (1973–79) and the Hackney Flashers’ politically charged ‘Who’s Holding the Baby?’ (1978), and the more recent (and welcome) upsurge of curatorial and critical attention to the creative practices and conditions that support artist-parents. While care work is slowly being recognised as one of the things the myth of artistic autonomy was built to deny, however, I do not think we have fully worked through or resolved the full scope of the argument: that motherhood’s relentless claims on time, body and attention run directly against the heterosexist patriarchal ideology of the solitary creative genius, that implicitly childless, implicitly masculine figure alone in his studio.
Art is Ours, Mine and Yours! builds on the recognition of care work and takes these questions further. In many explorations of artistic labour and care work, the child often remains the problem against which the artist-parent’s practice must be protected or defended, and for which accommodations must be won. Solidarity is extended to the parent. But what about the child? Even in discourses most alert to the politics of care, the child tends to be positioned as something done to the artist rather than as an artist in their own right.
Pioneering performance artist Shirley Cameron, who spoke at the symposium in May, has been making work with her daughters Lois and Colette since the 1970s. Her own catalogue lists that work as a strand in its own right, ‘Work with Lois and Colette’, alongside her work with her husband Roland Miller and with other artists including Evelyn Silver and Monica Ross. The daughters are indexed as artistic collaborators. Indeed, many other artist-parents have forged collaborations with their artist-children in various contexts. What Assunta and Lou Art Club proposes belongs to that lineage, but it is also a dynamic that Lou has insisted on. At a workshop in Lancaster in May 2025, participants arrived and began working on the quilt (made from an image Lou had chosen), but without her being introduced as the artist. She made it clear this was not the right approach and her position is now made explicit at every session. The workshops were Lou’s idea and would not have happened without her.
I come back, at the end, to a work on paper that was on display in the exhibition. Lou tells me it is her favourite of everything she has made and then tells me it is not just hers. It was made alongside her mother and the artist-mother Louisa Chambers and her artist-daughter Luna. The surging, scattered marks that had captured my attention were made, in fact, by four people. While named ‘Untitled’in the exhibition, I ask why it might now be called ‘Rainbow’, and Assunta remarks that she had not known about the new title. The work, and everything I found out about it, is typical of how the two of them proceed. The terms of their collaboration and support for one another as artists get worked out as they go, captions included. This is what working sensitively with others and across generations actually looks like: beautifully complex, with plenty of unknowns on all sides.
Art is Ours, Mine and Yours! Assunta and Lou Art Club was at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 23 May – 13 June 2026.
Elspeth Mitchell is a writer and researcher based in Leeds.
[1] Assunta Ruocco, “Index of love and care: The home–studio as milieu for art practice, childcare and insubordination”, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 9, no. 2 (2024): 311-324.
[2] Chester M Pierce and Gail B Allen, “CHILDISM”, Psychiatric Annals 5, no. 7 (July 1975): 15–24. doi:10.3928/0048-5713-19750701-04.
Published 11.09.2026 by Benjamin Barra in Explorations
2,072 words
