In the Studio: Phyllida Barlow

A window into Phyllida Barlow’s studio practice offering insights into her biography, key works and exhibitions

Over six decades, British artist Phyllida Barlow (1944-2023) developed a transformative approach to sculpture, creating restless, invented forms that placed audiences in new relationships with the object, the gallery environment and the world beyond. Though she made art steadily throughout her life, it was only after Barlow retired from teaching that her work came into greater public prominence. Barlow employed a distinctive vocabulary of inexpensive materials such as plywood, cardboard, plaster, cement, fabric and paint. Drawing on memories of familiar objects from her surroundings, she worked in an anti-monumental tradition characterized by her physical experience of handling materials, which she transformed through processes of layering, accumulation and juxtaposition. Her large-scale sculptural objects are frequently arranged in complex installations in which mass and volume seem to be at odds with the space around them.
In this guide to Barlow’s studio practice, curator Frances Morris explores the development of Barlow’s work and the making, unmaking and remaking, chance, mishaps and changes of mind through which the artist produced her pioneering works of art.