November 8, 2011 |
A teacher at London’s Slade Art School for four decades, Barlow has finally been getting her dues with an accelerated rush of solo shows in the past couple of years. She makes big, ragged sculpture grafted together from street finds – cement, oil barrels, hardboard, fabric, gaffer tape, cardboard boxes are all materials that she has used. The forms that emerge have an anxiety to them: great spires suggest watchtowers and street surveillance or, when lying on the floor as if they’ve just crash-landed there, unstable monuments, their dark innards like hiding places. It’s messy, paint seems slapped on, you can see where things have been moulded, or stuck together. Great, paint-smeared boulders seem ready to roll onwards, accumulating detritus as they go.
Everything seems in flux in your work, materials and ideas, fixed for the moment of a show, before evolving into something else. What can we expect from your forthcoming show?
“I have wanted to use the dimensions of every space, defy gravity and overwhelm the formal features of the Hauser & Wirth gallery and its previous identity as a bank. Materials are expedient and everyday – cheap timber, polystyrene, fabric, tape, cement, plaster, scrim, wire netting and other materials easily acquired at any DIY building centre. The processes are quick but labour intensive and hands-on.”
The materials often come from the street. What things tend to grab your attention in the urban landscape?
“Regeneration and decay, whether that is urban or rural or in between the two, has a kind of equivalence to how I make my work… a constant process of upheaval. I seek resolution and conclusion for the work, but have a resistance to it. Broken, ruined, semi-destroyed, half-covered, abandoned, redundant things have personal and metaphorical significance but most importantly carry a silent political association. They resist domestic references but evidence both human action and the forces of nature. Therefore, fallen, upright, stacked, empty, over-filled, cracked, painted, fragile, balanced, precarious, heavy, light, bright, dark, huge, tiny, fake, real qualities both attract and repel me. These occur anywhere, anytime.”
Until recently you were perhaps best known for your work at the Slade. Has teaching been important for your own development as an artist?
“It’s distressing to have a lifetime’s work as an artist perceived as being overshadowed by the day job. As a teacher I would focus on those who were struggling and were maybe more questioning about the role of the artist and what that entailed. I’ve always been more interested in individual success beyond excepted notions of degree results and exhibitions, in old-fashioned ideas of struggle and how individuals might define what motivates them and what they consider an achievement on their own terms.
Finally, Is recognition important?
“No. I have spent so much time making work for myself that I still find it an anomaly that there is interest beyond myself in what I produce.”
RIG, Sep 2-Oct 22; Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, W1 (www.hauserwirth.com); Barlow will also have a solo show at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2012
by Skye Sherwin
