Every summer the Gallery commissions an artist to make a work of art that engages with children. The London-based Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild has made a film which shows what happens when young boys are let loose in a gallery. Rothschild’s remarkable sculptures use shape, colour, crafts techniques and scale - they have ranged from domestic sized objects to the epic zigzag she created to transverse the galleries at Tate Britain – to fuse form with, in her words, ‘ideas of faith, death, magic, things that are all very messy…’. H... Read more

Every summer the Gallery commissions an artist to make a work of art that engages with children. The London-based Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild has made a film which shows what happens when young boys are let loose in a gallery.

Rothschild’s remarkable sculptures use shape, colour, crafts techniques and scale – they have ranged from domestic sized objects to the epic zigzag she created to transverse the galleries at Tate Britain – to fuse form with, in her words, ‘ideas of faith, death, magic, things that are all very messy…’. Her film shows a group of boys, aged between 6 and 12, each entering a gallery full of her sculptures. Slowly and tentatively the boys begin their interaction with the space by looking, then touching.

They proceed however, to totally dismantling the sculptures, revelling in the joys of play and of destruction. In this revelatory film, Rothschild investigates the particularly physical interaction boys have with the material world and with making things, while drawing attention to how sculpture in modern and contemporary art has been dominated by men.