A TEXTILE TALES tribute to Phyllida Barlow

Celebrating the British sculptor who sadly passed away this week.

“My relationship with sculpture has to be adventurous… almost on the edge of being out of my control”

“I like to use chance to allow accidents and mistakes to become part of what I’m doing. Impractical. Illogical. Not a nice tidy thing that comes out of a box.”

“It’s that notion of gravity pulling on things, making things collapse, and that potential to collapse.”

“My grandmother had a cupboard under the stairs and she kept every single thing that could possibly be re-used - everything was of value. I’ve been using the same materials for about 50 years. Mixing up industrial with domestic materials. Taking the ordinary and seeing it as extraordinary.”

“The actions and incidents of how things collapse, deteriorate and become repaired are great metaphors for the human condition.”

---

From The Guardian:

For years, Barlow worked alone and unrecognised, making sculptures while her beloved children were at school, that no one would ever see, out of binbags or whatever she could find, often treating her materials with a certain fury. “There was a lot of binding and tying and dipping and crushing,” she told me. It was only after her retirement from teaching that she was “discovered” by the fashionable art world, and picked up by a large commercial gallery. Invitations to exhibit and commissions flooded in.

She grasped these late opportunities of her 60s and 70s energetically, producing work on a gloriously massive scale, work that was unabashed, anything but polite; work that prodded and argued with and pretty much elbowed aside the graceful patriarchal sculpture halls in which she built it.

I hope this leads you into a Phyllida Barlow deep dive. This is a lovely video if you have a spare 30 minutes.