The Bright Eyes of Children brings together six artists whose practices differ in form and approach, the exhibition begins with a shared way of seeing: a direct, unguarded attention to the world, and the impulse to make something from what is found there.
This is not an exhibition about childhood, nor is it nostalgic. Instead, it considers a quality of looking that artists spend whole careers protecting: attention before interpretation, curiosity before certainty, and the instinct to make before the need to explain. Across the exhibition, this emerges through very different practices, from hand-built forms and quiet interiors to myth, memory and inherited traditions of making. Placed alongside one another, the works suggest that clarity of vision need not mean simplicity, and that looking openly can itself be a rigorous way of understanding the world
In place of white walls, the work is installed throughout 41 Whitfield Street, a nineteenth-century Fitzrovia building of uneven floors, narrow stairs and walls carrying decades of layered paint. Once part of the neighbouring pub, it later became one half of Pollock’s Toy Museum, heir to a Victorian toy-theatre tradition of printed sheets that children cut out, coloured and brought to life by hand. That history sits quietly within the rooms rather than on the labels. The building is not a backdrop, but a condition of how the work is seen.
The title comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 essay "Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” written in praise of Pollock’s toy-theatre shop:
“If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's…”