Phyllida Barlow: Homemade | Art21 "Extended Play"

[Phyllida Barlow: Homemade]

My mother was very creative:

knitting, dressmaking, sewing.

I love the way she would teach me

how to make dolls house furniture

out of discarded matchboxes.

Very simple, ad hoc ways of doing things.

The antithesis of the toy shop,

everything was about
resourcing it within the home.

When I was at art school,

there were so many rights and wrongs

about techniques, about processes,
about forms,

even about ideas.

And all sorts of things were taboo,

like domesticity, or certain crafts

that were perhaps associated with women,

like knitting or sewing.

It was the big,
heavy traditions of sculpture

that were important to learn,

and I wasn't that good at them.

Years later, my teaching
was very influenced

by not going towards
the right/wrong approach

but trying to find things
that could really

unravel something quite
idiosyncratic to that student.

You know, what were their aspirations?

What was going on in their head?

And then being able to invite them

to start thinking about processes

that would reflect those
desires and ambitions.

My teaching was very much to do

with what I felt I had
missed at art school.

I've got five children.

They're all nearly in their forties now.

And I think I wanted to
carry on that positive sense

that my mother had, that
they could have happy lives

and do what they wanted to do,

that they weren't obliged to fulfill

some higher expectation. [LAUGHS]

They all make art.

Our third daughter, she's
an HIV nurse in London.

So she's got a sensible job,

but she paints a lot, which is amazing.

There are plenty of artists
who don't have exhibitions.

There's plenty of art that's never seen.

And I think I'm intrigued by that.

Making work that does
not have a destination

has its loneliness and
its sadness about it.

And many artists endure
that for their entire lives,

and it's heroic.

The novel that never gets published,

should it never have been written?

Of course it should be.

It's making a fantastic contribution

to culture of the moment

because that individual has
that huge urge to do that

without any other qualifying pressures.

Those are my sort of private thoughts

that I think there's a
lot about the art world

and the way we experience art

that's fantastic, but
I think there's a lot

that's not entirely spoken
about or recognized,

which is the unseen and the unknown

and the creative act as a
deeply private experience.

There is this great, powerful desire

to just create something.

And does that just get eroded away?

I hope not. [LAUGHS]