♪energetic synths♪
Phyllida Barlow: This used to be my daughter's flat. It's the first time I've had a studio with a window.
I love this semi-industrial skyline. It suits me really perfectly. [LAUGHS]
I have a fascination with abandoned industrial objects.
Out of the back of our house where we look onto a railway yard,
you see these objects that had this very specific use suddenly becoming moribund.
To me, the idea of re-making those objects is another form of fossilizing. [LAUGHS]
Especially with a material like plaster and cement.
Sculpture can take on the world we're living in.
It can absorb color and those industrial processes.
A lot of builders use these colors to mark places which
needs repairs or mending.
They're colors of information in the urban environment.
For a lot of people born in the 40s, the shadow the war cast was very long.
I had extraordinary memories of London as quite a war-damaged city down in the East End.
The whole idea of damage and repair is an inherent process of making sculpture for me.
I've got some blunt scissors here. [laughs]
[James Tailor] The aesthetic of something looking like it's gonna fall apart
is something I quite enjoy in my work.
It's nice to work with another artist who has that kind of
aesthetic happening.
She's great.
She's absolutely lovely.
[Phyllida] I pay him to say--
[James] That's exactly what I should say right now.
It's actually really nice working for her.
[Phyllida] Good.
That's another 10 pounds. [Laughs]
[James] Can I go home early today?
[Phyllida] During the 60s, there were three very significant sculpture shows in London at the Whitechapel
Gallery, challenging sculpture in all sorts of ways.
All the sculptures were painted,
fiberglass and resin was used as the materials. The traditional skills of
sculpture were being challenged, questioning that hierarchy that bronze and stone had.
I found earthy materials like plaster and cement really compelling.
I started using fiberglass and resin and painting my sculptures.
Of course, I'd looked at Eva Hesse. I was completely mesmerized by her work.
That a hanging piece of cloth could actually take on consuming space.
I was determined to participate in these new approaches to sculpture.
[sawing]
There's a sort of method in the madness. [LAUGHS]
This particular group are all about compression. About
things being very closed and tightly contained. It's not so much about an idea as about an action.
Making the smaller works is the initiation of the larger works.
I know I want the color to be something that's inherent to it and not just applied at the end.
That's why I'm putting the fabric on the cardboard at this stage,
so the thing is almost like a rock strata or something.
[drilling]
Oopsie. [laughs]
I think I was more interested in processes of production,
rather than having an idea and then just making it.
I quite like the long, slow process of drawing, thinking about it, then moving to materials.
Those thoughts in your head start to diminish and the thing in front of you gains momentum of its own.
I'm always interested in the slippage memory has and painting is a fantastic
way of recording that slippage where things are inaccurate.
A lot of the quick work has a lot to do with
having so little time in the studio when the children were young, you know.
So, this is a deal I made with myself that if it was only an hour or two hours, I had to have done something.
I went when I was 16, as a painter, to art school.
Painting would have these quite strict procedures about them. There were so many rights and wrongs
about techniques, about forms. And it became very obvious to me that paintings use walls.
And to me, walls are very authoritarian. [LAUGHS] They decide what the space is.
A stand-alone sculpture is using the space that we could occupy or something more worthwhile.
Its possibility for being anarchic excites me a lot. I think I've
found that like a kind of escape from the whole business of getting something right.
In the way I work now, which is quite big, my relationship with the sculptures is:
Where does the space escape to?
What is the ambition of the space and the way
that it becomes enclosed? And what happens if that space is explored to the maximum?
♪curious synths♪
Yes, they're all upside-down. [laughs]
Ugh,
that's annoying.
I think I must have just shoved them in there.
Yes.
This is more looking at where sculpture ends up and what happens if it ends up in places where
it's not meant to be.
At a time when I wasn't having exhibitions, saying, "Well, this is good
enough for me putting my sculpture in this hallway for four hours before people want it back again"
shows me that there's a great kind of gaping hole about what and where sculpture is meant to be,
and I think I have sort of always been interested in the object that seems badly behaved.
This was an object for an ironing board. It's a bit of that kind of nostalgic thing. Oh,
the work has got worse [LAUGHS] over the years. It hasn't got better.
Shall we begin the second coat then? Yeah.
How should we do it?
Randomly pick a color that isn't a red, yeah.
Working with a bunch of younger artists is very important for me.
I've just got stuck on the de Kooning colors.
I feel hugely responsible and a sort of anxiety that the deal is beneficial to them.
They're part-time and they're self-employed. I work closely with my studio manager, Adam, and
we're always thinking, "What can we offer them? Like, a three-month block guaranteeable."
I think being a mother makes one quite sensitive to what people are going through.
Yeah, that's fine.
It's pretty scruffy.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah.
At the moment, there are quite a lot of assistants because we're very behind on finishing the work
for an exhibition.
The way I inform them of certain aesthetic qualities that I want
is keeping their actions to something that is more functional than artistic.
Like a cleaning gesture with a brush that happens to be loaded with paint.
It's about information and expedience.
Some of the best times I've had was just taking the work to places so I
could have a different relationship with it from it being produced in the studio.
I noticed that I was looking up a lot at the trees, and I thought of something that
had a sense of industry about it, where the looking up would be looking through a frame
at the trees and the skies, and that's where the steel frame structure at the top of the
columns came into existence.
And then to have something that was possibly
left behind in a state of entropy, which was these worn out steps.
It's you and the work and the place. It's a very particular relationship,
where there's nothing else coming between you and that intention.
Going it alone is a very powerful experience.
I'd love to do a piece that could perhaps go very near the sea or in some incredibly remote
landscape where the audience isn't a factor of the work.
It's more about the "tree that
falls in the forest, but if you haven't seen it, did it actually happen" kind of question.
[LAUGHS]