Barricades and baffles, teetering planes of painted board, precarious towers and staircases to nowhere; bulbous ovoids like cartoonish decapitations mounted on sticks; great swaths of bright yet noticeably soiled cloth, piles of discarded pallets, hanging ropes, pillars and ideas – they all collided in Phyllida Barlow’s often sprawling sculptural installations. “It is pointless to define what sculpture is,” Barlow wrote in a series of “provocations” in 2018. Barlow, who has died aged 78, was nothing but provocative – as an artist, a teacher, a lecturer and a writer.
Confrontational, disarming, sometimes confusing, her art had an immediate physical presence, a sense of untameable materiality and a palpable vitality. Standing in her 2014 Tate Britain commission that filled the Duveen Galleries, I feared at times for my personal safety, never mind my clothing, among all the reclaimed timber, the chicken wire and papier-mache, the gouts of plaster, all that concrete, scrim and tar.
