The Late Phyllida Barlow Turned Everyday Waste into Wondrous Sculptures

“I like the idea of work being very impractical and very illogical and not a nice tidy thing that comes out of a box,” said the sculptor Phyllida Barlow in a 2019 documentary.

Given those goals, it seems she succeeded: No one would ever describe Barlow’s work as “a nice tidy thing.” Her ungainly forms are crafted from the most basic of materials—cardboard, plywood, and polystyrene, even detritus salvaged from a skip, molded together with plaster and concrete. And yet somehow they inspire awe. “She was just great with the cheapest, most horrible stuff,” said former Tate Modern director Frances Morris, who has curated the posthumous exhibition “Phyllida Barlow. unscripted” at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, on show through January 5, 2025.

The exhibition, which brings together sculptures from several major installations, as well as a number of free-standing sculptures dating from the early 1970s until the last years of her life, provides a fascinating overview of the work of this singular artist, who died in 2023 at the age of 78.

Born in Newcastle in 1944, she was the daughter of Erasmus Barlow, an eminent psychiatrist who was himself the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. After World War II, the family moved to London, where her father took a strange delight in taking his young family on drives through the bomb-damaged East End. “For me that was a very strong experience,” Barlow said. This awareness of the devastation that war causes would later become evident in the toppled houses and giant, splayed plank constructions that appear in many of her installations.

Another key influence from her early years was her grandmother’s under-stair cupboard, which contained anything that could be reused—bits of candles of various lengths, rubber bands, lid tops, and jars. “Everything was of value,” the artist noted, an approach she certainly applied to her own work.

Barlow attended Chelsea College of Arts where she met her future husband Fabian Peake, the son of Gormenghast writer and artist Mervyn Peake. She then went on to the Slade School of Fine Art, first as a student and then as a teacher, although the birth of the first of five children in 1973 put a temporary stop to her teaching and artmaking. She considered raising children and making art “completely incompatible. That’s not meant to be cruel or regretful. Both are creative,” Barlow said. But in the end, two of her children (Eddie Peake and Florence Peake) followed in their mother’s footsteps, and are now successful artists in their own right.

She returned to teaching in her forties, ending up back at the Slade, eventually becoming a professor before retiring in 2009. By all accounts, Barlow was one of those inspirational teachers who was universally adored by generations of students, many of whom went on to fame and fortune while she toiled away in relative anonymity. It was through a group of those celebrated former pupils—Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean, and Martin Creed—that she came to the attention of Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth.

This major gallery support was a late-career turning point. Barlow had her first major museum show at the Serpentine in 2010, was made a Royal Academician in 2011, commissioned by Tate Britain to create an ambitious work for the Duveen Galleries in 2014, and created a uniquely uncontainable installation, folly, for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. In 2021 she was made a dame.

It was a stunning rise to fame and adulation after so many years of living in the shadows—although, as the Somerset show reveals, those years were far from unproductive. In the show, a series of statement works reveal the many artists that Barlow was in dialogue with throughout her career. “Very few artists are so open and honest about the artists they admire, who they’ve stolen from and who their work is in homage to,” said Morris. A beautifully multicolored striped column, which on closer inspection appears to be crafted from an array of urban detritus, shows the influence of Arte Povera, while an old TV topped with sculpted bunny ears—a recurring motif—is “[Salvador] Dalí’s Lobster Telephone in another form,” said Morris.

Barlow went “through the process of understanding and critiquing sculpture to come up with something profoundly original,” explained Morris. That originality is evident in the gallery featuring parts of past installations, including folly. Boulders hang from the ceiling above a sprawling mass of twisted fabric and organic forms, while rock-like formations jut out from the wall. The objects are at once familiar and strangely alien. “They signify things in the real world but they don’t represent them. She called them ‘phantom objects,’” said Morris.

Although many of the works are monochrome, Morris pointed out that they are, intriguingly, shot through with color. “They all speak to the fact that Phyllida really thought of herself as a painter rather than a sculptor,” she said. It seems that Barlow had been on the cusp of exploring that passion just before she died. The exhibition features the first and only paintings that Barlow ever produced, miniature works on canvas that Morris refers to as “maquette paintings.” A mix of abstractions and depictions of the forms that appeared in her sculpture, they offer a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.