Phyllida Barlow at Tate Britain. Excellent exhibition.

When I had some time to kill between lectures I went to the Tate Britain to see the new sculptural installation (commissioned work) called 'Deck' by the British artist Phyllida Barlow, located in the Duveen galleries and loosely inspired by the view from Tate Britain Milbank of barges floating in the Thames.

 

 The work is in stark contrast to the newly refurbished galleries and staircase which look really composed, elegant, neo classical. Phyllida Barlow's work is massive, chaotic, in all possible ways. I could walk through it and around it. It is an anti monument made out of every day ordinary materials such as cardboard, polystyrene, foam, colourful tape, wood (timber), a combination of texture and colour, scrap materials that have not been used for years, that one would not associate with a monument - these are used to make stilted giant towers, with cardboard which doesn't sit perfectly straight, the jumbled pieces of wood stuck one on top of the other, going in different directions - these bring a sense of chaos to the whole section.  It is in your face and you can't avoid the work as it is so large and imposing, there is no refinement to it, it is blatantly crude.

She says: 'The idea to begin with was incredibly simple: to plant into the Duveen a new structure that counteracted the reverent, vaulted space, and its almost religious connotations, and introduce an almost basic geometry'. Barlow with these colossal architectural structures made out of ordinary materials (some are built like scaffoldings), is referring to industrial structures, containers, while at the same time referring to the history of sculpture very present in the other rooms of Tate Britain.

 

 

The first piece is made out of five large blocks,  the size of a shipping container, with orange and black cords; everything is mangled, nothing is straight or precise, nor precious. I am not allowed to touch anything, though, and I really feel like touching the mad tower made out of cardboard and colourful tape similar in height to the other pillars in the gallery. It is a funny joke about the straight classical, past monuments made by men; nothing is certain in her installation, her column is not perfectly straight but is made out of crumbled cardboard and it's got colour around it in total opposition to the seriousness and self importance of past monuments; but the work is huge like past and current male artists love to make. In one way it's great that a woman artist  is commissioned to do such giant work, on the other hand why does a woman artist need to do big work as a male artist? This is my own general question: do women artists need to play like their male counterpart artists in order to be recognised? The large scale sculptures are excellent; while walking through them just the sheer size of them, going up to the roof and down to the floor, brought me mentally back to the past and to large scale monuments, architectural works, and to question their validity and place in society. Also by whom they where chosen and for whom? Especially considering that women were not included generally in monuments and did not participate in the making of monuments in the past, so in this context I find Phyllida Barlow's sculptural installation excellent and feminist, and I looked at in comparison to past monuments made by men for men and in comparison to Tate Britain which was built by masculine authority. (Nowadays, however, Tate Britain does show plenty of work by women artists, more so than other galleries.) The sum of her works stands in comparison to Tate Britain's solid structure, a skeleton, a dystopian view, with the look of ruins. The work is about assembling, storing, arrangement, the material is predominant and is right in your face. There is no single viewpoint for the work so the viewer is forced to move around, across and under the work.

Barlow's work also refers to arte povera, minimalism, and to British sculpture of the past.

 

 Yes, everybody can enjoy the sculptural installation and the simple ordinary materials, combined with coloured tape these make you think of a child playing, assembling; there is nothing high tech in place apart from the way it's assembled that I am sure required a specialist team. Barlow said: “I love the cliché that a child could do it. Yes, a child could do it, but when you’re an adult, you’re doing it for real, either because there’s some OCD condition where you’re a hoarder, or for practical reasons, or you shift a bit further over and it’s in a museum of art''.  Through her work she questions the fundamental aspects of sculpture, its presence in space and its physicality, a combination of softness and hardness.

Phyllida Barlow was a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art; her students included Angela de la Cruz and Rachel Whiteread; she was a strong influence on a young generation of artists. Previously she studied at the Chelsea School of Arts (1960-63) and later at the Slade School of Art (1963-66) where she trained conventionally in sculpture and in techniques such as metal casting, armature construction, plaster modelling etc. I find this interesting as nowadays in art colleges across the UK there is no conventional teaching (apart from theory), or practical classes.

I went to her exhibition because I work with found, scrap materials in my own sculptures and was interested in how she used those materials and also because in my own work I aim to create something different.

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Shelagh Wakely at the Camden Arts Centre.

The Camden Arts Centre

At the Camden Arts Centre they usually have good exhibitions on and they're free; I can't actually remember if they have ever had a bad exhibition! I arrived at the exhibition from walking on a very busy, full-of-heavy-traffic street, the Finchley Road - I wished that I had gone up to Hampstead station on the northern line and walked down through the charming and quieter streets of Hampstead to get there. At the Camden Arts Centre they show emerging artists, international artists, and more established better-known artists and they run a residency programme to help artists develop in their practice. They combine this with educational activities, public events, talks, film screenings, art performances and family activities. The Camden Arts Centre is a Grade II listed building and an Arts Council art centre; it was refurbished in 2004.

The Director, since 1990, of the Camden Arts Centre is Jenny Lomax OBE. In the 1970's she worked at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of a curatorial team set up by Nicholas Serota. This time I saw the exhibition by British artist Shelagh Wakely (1932-2011) which expanded from the Gallery into the garden and included ceramics, unfired clay sculptures, prints, videos, and drawings.

I did find interesting that she lived abroad a lot. She spent most of her youth in Kenya and later on in Brazil. She studied at the Chelsea College of Arts (1958-1962) and she worked as a textile and clothing designer in the 1960's; all of these different elements in her life are present in her work.

In gallery 3 on the floor there is a gilded black silk sheet (pic above), slashed with a knife, and the gold side of the piece reflects ambient light and should cover the room in a shimmering pool of gold, this would turn the art work into an installation piece; but I didn't experience or see this because it was a grey day so I could only observe the piece on the floor without the whole room being suffused with light.

In the room there are two gold trolleys with wilted fruit but in one trolley the fruits looked fresher than those in the other; the gallery assistant explained to me that this was because they had been made by the gallery assistants while the older fruits actually were found in Shelagh Wakely's studio. I have to admit I preferred the older looking ones - they made me think of a ghost in a room: the fruits looked greyish and lacked the golden vibrancy of the other fruits, they are like a negative. There are also organic pieces, such as tangerines, grapefruit, aubergines which are left to rot and are gilded - some are covered in gold to look wrinkled and dried.... it's about the passage of time, it reminds you how things were, vital and full of life but now they are dead.

In the middle room inside a case there is a necklace made from a string of cherries and fruits, imprisoned inside a cage of fine wire jewellery. Here again the fruits are wilted, they have been left to rot, the combination of these elements gives the piece a sense of fragility, of the passing of time, something vital has been turned  into a skeleton.

In Gallery 2 on the floor I saw a giant swirling pattern of turmeric made out of cut-outs, stencils not easy to make, as they are done in blocks to make them look like an uninterrupted piece, the turmeric with the light would cover the whole room in yellow but again I didn't experience this or see it because it was a grey day outside. I couldn't smell the turmeric either so I didn't experience the installation side of the art work, and can't say like others have said that her work goes beyond boundaries, that it floods all spaces. Nor can I say that her work involves all the senses as I wasn't allowed to touch anything due to the fragility of the pieces, but I was also told by the galleries assistant that they had worked with kids reproducing some of the pieces in the exhibition, which is great!

 In the garden there is another work of Shelagh Wakely's. I felt that the garden was actually the weakest link in the exhibition as the squares laid out there would have been better shown on a dark surface, as presented in the gallery leaflet, rather than on grass. The colour of the bright green grass was overwhelming the piece and it distracted me from focusing on the actual work of the piece and in particular the delicacy of the small pieces of silver inside was overwhelmed by the green grass. The piece stands out more on a dark surface - check pic below.

In the Garden are also works by Susan Hiller (with sounds - this was the one I liked best!) and  Alison Wilding and Richard Deacon. Another area in the garden is also dedicated to plants with  medicinal properties such as chervil, anise, angelica etc.. this is based on Wakely's own garden in North London and also inspired by a commission that Wakely did for St Geroge's hospital in Tooting, which shows her love of nature.

Lastly in one of the rooms were large drawings, doodles of bowls that turn into something quite different, concave or abstract shapes, where colour is minimally used with splashes of blues and reds predominant; some of the drawings could be considered negatives or between positive and negative, a transitory face due to their indefinite structure. There are also films in the show in which one could see Shelagh Wakely working outdoors, leaving her work to be affected by the weather and it was interesting to watch how this changed the actual pieces.