I think this for me also is as you say born out of necessity but trying to push the barriers of that in quite an extreme way. Definitely we're working on a show in Toronto, Mocha in Toronto and organising the materials therefore I'm making the smaller ideas beginning to make them there. It's a sort of extraordinary awkward space with lots of different shops and coffee places and very interesting large columns there. But one of the things that may be working in this way makes more difficult is the organic shape because of the way I build those shapes up so it's going to be interesting to see whether I don't return to things that I was doing possibly 40 years agoyou know.
In March this year, we went to Finsbury Park in London to the home of Phyllida Barlow to interview her for the A brush with… podcast. Tragically, Phyllida died just a few days later. So this conversation is a tribute to one of the most significant British artists of recent years. Ardently committed to sculpture and convinced of its special power, she was coruscatingly erudite and perceptive, yet also irreverent and suspicious of orthodoxies. This was evident in her combinations of simple materials such as wood, plaster and scrim, cement, paint and fabric in extraordinary sculptures and installations. She managed to achieve at once awkwardness and grace, humour and pathos, the grand and the intimate. Among much else, Phyllida discusses the morality imposed on sculpture in her art school days, the underacknowledged “dirty side of making” in Marcel Duchamp’s work, her admiration for Louise Nevelson and Eduardo Chillida, the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the films of Robert Bresson. Plus she answers our usual questions, including a moving response to the ultimate question, “What is art for?”
Phyllida Barlow, Chillida Leku, Hernani, near San Sebastian, Spain, until 22 October; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto, 8 September-4 February 2024.
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