Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture 1963–2023, by Frances Morris (Fruitmarket Publishing and Hauser & Wirth Publishers, £52/$60.)
The physical impact of handling this hefty book is, in its own way, almost as powerful as the experience of Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture, though not quite. Barlow’s work is rooted in relationships—the relationship of the viewer to the object, and the object’s relationship to the viewer. Those relationships are, of course, mutable, as audiences navigate in, around, and through the spaces occupied by her sculptures and installations. The artist, who died last year, labored over her work for more than six decades while also teaching multitudes of artists how to “look, make and think,” to borrow from Fiona Bradley’s introduction.
The current book began its life as Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture 1963–2015, published in conjunction with “set,” her 2015 Fruitmarket exhibition. That earlier edition emerged out of Frances Morris’s discussions with Barlow about the making of dock, her 2014 Duveen commission at Tate Britain, as well as “set.” The revised and expanded publication additionally draws on Morris’s experience of curating “unscripted,” an exhibition of Barlow’s work at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, which the artist had just begun to work on before her death. Also considered are “folly,” made for the British Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and Barlow’s material experiments during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Bradley’s brief introduction is followed by eight informative chapters by Morris and three groups of Barlow’s summer diary entries. These sections make it clear that Barlow and Morris had developed a rapport and a productive relationship that enabled shared looking and thinking. The reader’s journey begins in Barlow’s home and studio in 2015, a starting point that emphasizes the significance of this space for her and recalls her childhood arrival in London when the city was still scarred by the World War II. Then, comes her time as a student at Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s (when she was more interested in surrounding architecture than the model) and the regeneration of King’s Road, with its cornucopia of building waste. Barlow’s material interests were already emerging at that point, and Morris connects them to the urban street and railway environment. Focused more on the tactile than the pictorial, Barlow moved beyond the traditions of sculpture while still a student, beginning a lifelong conversation between tradition and modernity. After art school, she developed an interest in contemporary theater, opera, film, and the novel, something that endures in the theatricality of her recent works.
In the 1970s, the spatial dynamics of White Room (1970) meant that interior space became a landscape. Later, materials were wrapped, covered, bagged up, bound, and stuffed in works such as Fold (1988), Fill (1983), and Engulf (1987) in which Barlow was also more ambitious in terms of scale. Studio time was curtailed by teaching and parenting in the 1980s, and often, objects were conceived for the studio alone, a safe space.
When dock filled the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, Barlow took the opportunity to challenge the institution while forcing visitors to clamber through the material and the made. At Fruitmarket the following year, every inch of the upstairs gallery was filled to bursting with an overwhelming structure that caused visitors to (re)experience their bodies in close proximity to it. Those claustrophobic imaginings were turned inside out in “folly,” for the Venice Biennale, which compressed the pavilion space and brought the outside in, while contrariwise, spilling material beyond the building. For “cul-de-sac,” at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019, Barlow took a less intensive approach, working with the given space and affording the works room to breathe.
Barlow’s last major sculptural endeavor, “PRANK,” returned to biomorphic forms with seven large maquettes commissioned for New York’s Public Art Fund in 2020. “PRANK” was installed in City Hall Park from June through November 2023, although Barlow never saw it there. A later edition was shown in the gardens at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, in May 2024—what Morris refers to as a public statement of letting go, propelling forward to an unknown future. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the book is when Morris visits Barlow’s home almost a year after her death and encounters intimate drawings and small paintings she had never seen before. Like “PRANK,” Morris says, these are Barlow’s last works, but not late works. They will forever sit on the cusp of an unknown future that will never now be realized. Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture 1963–2023 is about Barlow’s work across the decades, of course. Equally, it is about the burgeoning relationship between artist and curator, about ways of looking and making that leave an indelible mark on the reader.
