At five years of age, Astrid might well be the youngest exhibition curator of all time. “I’m really looking forward to deciding where the art goes,” she says, demonstrating a natural instinct for her new role. “And I’ve really enjoyed working with Daddy too!” Daddy, as it happens, is Will Cooper, Astrid’s co-curator on a new art show called My Kid Could’ve Done That! The title is a cheeky one, alluding to the stock tabloid dismissal of any contemporary art that doesn’t look like a Rembrandt. But the show is more nuanced: rather than invite audience members to guess which scribbles on the wall are highly theoretical abstract works and which are toddler doodles, it invites 15 artists (Ryan Gander, Emily Speed and Jasleen Kaur among them) to create work alongside their children. The aim is to reveal some deeper truths about family creativity, the blur between work and play and the perilous state of childcare for freelance creatives – all areas that have come into sharper focus during the pandemic. “It’s not supposed to be a cutesy exhibition of sugar paper drawings that go up in the foyer during summer, lovely as they are,” says Cooper. “It was important to treat the show the same way as you would treat artwork in any exhibition, make it climate controlled like you would any big name artist’s show.” Cooper didn’t want to be prescriptive as to what the artists should be doing, so the show will feature a range of intriguing takes on the artistic possibilities that arise when kids are allowed to contribute/run amok in the studio. Dickon Drury has allowed his son Cosmo’s colourful mark-marking on to the canvas; Kate Owens has incorporated her daughter Trudy’s love of mazes into her work and Kaur has been making samosa sculptures with her son Rai – partly to give him something fun to play with afterwards. All of this, as anyone au fait with toddler attention spans will understand, is subject to change until the date of the show. While clearly playful and fun, several artists found themselves compelled to comment on the trials of juggling childcare with creative careers. Sculptor and installation artist Harriet Bowman wanted her work to represent the experience of sharing her studio with her son Len over the years. She had originally intended to make something with Len’s favourite material, clay, but then wondered if she could find a way to represent the other, less “creative” part of having a kid in the studio four days a week. The reality, she admits, is that when she has busy days and deadlines to hit, Len will watch shows such as Yakka Dee and Alphablocks for hours on end while she gets on with her work. Bowman wanted to reflect that reality – and the accompanying guilt she sometimes feels – by making wallpaper that features screenprints of the shows Len enjoys and a text that covers everything they’ve done as a pair in the studio over the past four years: “It lists work being broken, his tantrums, my embarrassment and shame, prams fitting in lifts, lifts being out of service, constant tidying, going to meetings with leaking breasts, and someone walking off with the printout of my birth plan from the shared photocopier,” she says with admirable honesty. The wallpaper will cover the entire back wall of the gallery and has been an interesting learning curve for her as an artist. “In the initial stages of planning, I felt a pressure to make something ‘art-looking’ with Len. But the moment I started to apply any sort of pressure to making, Len immediately pushed back and became uninterested.” As with all the artists, the key was to find a compromise that felt like a genuine collaboration. That stands for the curatorial side, too, which required Cooper to adapt to his daughter’s working methods. “Kids don’t hold back,” he says. “If I ask if something is a good idea she will either say yes, or ‘no that’s a rubbish idea’.” Astrid certainly has her own firm thoughts on what the exhibition should involve. She wants some of her own artwork included (“which isn’t something a curator would normally do,” laughs her dad) and is also adamant that signs should be made for all the artworks. “I don’t know if she means the labels that go on the walls or actual physical signs that point you in the direction of the paintings. But over the year and a half we’ve been planning that’s the one constant she’s talked about, so we will have to make that happen.” She also has another important request: after watching an old Ferrero Rocher advert Astrid decided that the exhibition’s private view should have a similar pyramid – but made out of Tunnock’s Teacakes. “And let’s face it,” says Will, “that’s something all exhibitions should have.”