A Brilliant Way of Looking

Alison Wilding: Phyllida interviewed me for the graduate program at Chelsea School of Art in 1970 or 1971. I was in my third year at Ravensbourne and not used to seeing a woman tutor, although I do remember seeing Elisabeth Frink on the premises. But Phyllida seemed only a bit older than myself, and she was extremely friendly. I had a great interview with her and Matt Rugg, another teacher from Chelsea. They offered me a place on the spot, but I was set on going to the Royal College of Art, where there were no women tutors in the sculpture school and in fact very few women at all.

Bill Woodrow: I first met Phyllida when I was in my final year at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1971. I had applied to a postgraduate program at Chelsea School of Art, and she came with other tutors from Chelsea to see my diploma show. I found out years later from Phyllida that there was one work in particular she was really keen on, and apparently she worked very hard to make sure I got a place in the program.

I don’t know exactly what it was she liked, but knowing her interests, I would think she liked the scale of the piece—it was twenty feet across—and the way it used the room and was so simple, with no glue or joining. I entered the postgraduate program at Chelsea, from 1971 to 1972, and I met her again there.

Sam Taylor-Johnson: I met Phyllida in the early 1990s, when I was at East London Polytechnic. It was a very tough, very macho art college then. The sculpture department was in a large shipbuilding yard, and everything was about how big and how strong you could make something. I was trying to figure out my place in the world of art school. I had landed there from a dysfunctional childhood, and I was very grateful to be there, but I had no idea what I was doing.

Natasha Kidd: I was at the Slade for a long time, from 1992 to 1998. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees there, and afterward I went on to teach at Chelsea. I lived on the end of the same road as Phyllida in Finsbury Park, so even after I left the Slade, I kept bumping into her. We’d have conversations in the supermarket. I was a young mum and trying to figure out how to teach and make work—even if the work wasn’t visible—and she really legitimized that space for me.

Jess Flood-Paddock: I met Phyllida at my interview for the Slade in 1996. I was eighteen. I remember she was there with fellow tutors Bruce McLean and Bernard Cohen, and they stood in a big circle around us. They opened my portfolio and spread it out on the floor—all my drawings filled the floor of that big room. I remember being surprised that they did that. Phyllida asked me at the end whether I wanted to come to the Slade, meaning that she was offering me a place if I went into sculpture. She was quite direct about it, and I was surprised because I had applied to do painting. But I just trusted them, and it felt right from the beginning. Phyllida became my tutor for the next four years.

Mark Godfrey: I joined the Slade in 2002 and was Phyllida’s colleague there until I left in 2007. We did studio critiques together every Wednesday morning.

At that time, most of the staff at the Slade could be divided into two groups: older men and younger artists—and then there was Phyllida, who had a different mood about her. We would muck around in meetings, making silly jokes and behaving stupidly. We laughed about the pretentious things students and staff would sometimes say, or the bureaucracy and some of the mundane parts of running an art school. We got to like each other and shared a mischievous sense of humor.

Prem Sahib: Phyllida was my personal tutor at the Slade, and during my time there she became the director of undergraduates. I remember our first meeting quite distinctly because it was my interview for the Slade. I was nineteen or so, and I was incredibly nervous and intimidated by the situation, but she made me feel welcome and relaxed. I remember her warm energy and how at ease her presence made me feel.

I had a big A1 portfolio that I’d lugged with me from the suburbs, and I went through every page with her. She had an amazing ability to see through the pretensions of a situation and meet you as an artist, with a kind of knowingness. In a short space of time, she detected things in my work that I hadn’t seen yet and led me to ask questions that have remained in my practice since. She somehow always hit the nail on the head. That was the thing about Phyllida: She made you feel seen and heard.

Taylor-Johnson: Phyllida came in one day as a visiting lecturer when I had started my studies at East London Polytechnic. I was one of the few women in the department and she sought me out. She heard I was a pain in the ass and said, “I’ve been told you are a troublemaker and I shouldn’t come to see you.” So we sat down and talked, and I found her very easy to talk to. She was interested in what I was trying to do with my ideas and my work, where I was heading in my mind. She took one long, hard look at me and said, “You’re in the wrong place.”

She suggested I apply to a different program at Goldsmiths, which she described as having a lot of exciting ideas and thoughts, including an artist named Damien Hirst—I had never heard of him at the time—who had just organized the influential student exhibition “Freeze.” She thought my work could fit well there. She set up an interview for me at Goldsmiths, and off I trotted to an interview. I was offered a place and I took it. After I switched programs, Phyllida would still check in with me to see how I was getting on. She was very nurturing, and she said if it all goes wrong, come back to me. It was a really massive influential turning point for me, and I am extremely grateful. She changed the course of my life.

Ángela de la Cruz: I was Phyllida’s student from 1994 to 1996 at the Slade. She had a sort of psychological approach in getting to know each student and their work individually. She was very generous in sharing her ideas and helping students develop.

She taught me to allow myself to be more vulnerable. I was very obsessed with having things meticulously in order and she encouraged me to be more chaotic and to experiment with my visual language.

Sahib: I didn’t know very much about art or the art world when I started at the Slade. I felt lucky to encounter Phyllida as my first person and my entry into all of that. She was a real artist’s artist, and that made her work very relatable. The questions she had with her work were things I could relate and respond to: how something takes up space or how certain materials can embody commentary through their physicality. The idea of where a work situates you as a viewer in relation to it is something I have thought about a lot in my own work. She made me think about tension between the viewer and the space, when things are teetering on collapse and there is potential for change. It was inspiring.

Godfrey: She seemed to try to get the very best from each student, to make them understand their deepest motivations for making art. She would get to the heart of the absolutely strange and ineffable process of being a creator. I was an art historian, so my approach was very different. I remember seeing the expressions on students’ faces when they heard what she said and took it in, as if she’d gotten to the core of their hopes and fears of being an artist. She would ask the very thing that was going to drive them on to the next moment of creativity.

Kidd: I recall some of the talks she’d give, about how the wall and painting were institutional. And how the floor, as the place for sculpture, was a more activist space. I feel like I was trying to make paintings that came off the wall but never made it. The slides she showed during talks always presented works that weren’t in galleries. They were objects that weren’t recognized by institutional spaces—they were more anarchic, playful kinds of objects, like bin bags in a field. The Young British Artists were having a huge moment then, doing all these big gallery shows, yet someone like Phyllida was making these gorgeous, messy things that were populating spaces beyond the white cube.

Sahib: Near the end of my time at the Slade, I was involved in a project where we would stage exhibitions in the back of a truck, and once we pulled up outside her house and had an impromptu exhibition.

Flood-Paddock: We became really close friends, and we stayed that way until she died. It was useful to talk to her about what I was doing in the studio, and once she said to me, “Well, I’m a modernist.” And then I thought, “Okay, that makes so much sense!” Phyllida was very much about materials—about touch, weight, balance. She was not a contemporary artist, but she was teaching contemporary artists.

Sahib: Her politics were implicit—in her being, in her teaching, in her interactions with students. There are things I remember her being passionate about, such as the undermining of the plinth. And she was not a fan of pedestals. You could possibly read into that, about the way she was thinking at the time. She wasn’t scared of lobbying for change. She encouraged us to be bold. She made me think that everything could be a material, that even the things we are going through could be transformed.

Flood-Paddock: She was democratic as a tutor and did not prioritize one student over another. She treated us all like artists from the very start. It was different then—the tutorials were minimal, and you were left on your own more to make work in the studios.

She was a very good listener. She could say a couple of small things and that would trigger something in me about what I was doing. She was a mentor, really. She didn’t give particular advice, but she would draw attention to something I hadn’t realized was important. I remember in my second year, I had been away for a term in Chicago and I came back to London. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing, and she told me to come in over the summer to see her. She gave me two dates, and I went. We sat together in the quad and looked at a tree. And she said to me, “What do you see?” and asked me to describe it. I said, “Well, I see a trunk, I see the bark.…” And she asked, “But what are you actually looking at? Are you seeing how the tree has grown, its history?” So we sat and looked at things in the quad, and it was really difficult to do! But as a sculptor, it was a really good thing to do. It put me in the moment of being able to see what is physically in front of me. That was one of the best bits of teaching she did for me.

Wilding: “What about water? A wave…,” Phyllida offered during a visit to my studio in the early 1990s. I was stuck on a large work [that became Harbour, 1994–96]. I don’t know where that idea came from, but it was absolutely what the work needed and was given.

Godfrey: She would not ask, “Why is it yellow and round?” She would try to draw a connection between the attitude of the object and the maker’s attitude, and help the maker understand their motives: What is it about me as a human that is compelled to spend time with this material making this thing right now? Why could there be no other outcome of this day than making this thing in the studio?

Wilding: My work Solenoid (2015) is a wrapping of waxed string. It is an attempt to make a form through repetition, which can be boring but necessary. I thought of Phyllida a lot while making it. I liked how it was different from everything else I was making, but at the same time it was not something that she would have made. Phyllida’s early work Torso (1985)—cellotape wrapped around a shelf that has gone crusty and yellow over the years—is the work that comes closest to it.

Sahib: She was a big advocate of making and testing and allowing for failure—that was a real Phyllida lesson. I was at the Slade from 2002 to 2006, when it still felt experimental and unruly and there wasn’t so much pressure of professionalism.

Wilding: I was teaching a postgraduate course at the Slade, and Phyllida was teaching undergraduate courses, which she ultimately ran until her retirement. Her students were obviously having the time of their lives—it was hands on with plaster, paper, rubbish, rapid building of structures, breaking stuff down and building it up again. Breaking rules, gusto, curiosity, mistakes, failure, chaos and laughter. Phyllida was a consummate communicator, and sculpture was her motivating passion. It was not the way I approached teaching, but then my practice and hers were entirely different and yet somehow complementary. Phyllida’s making was relentless, and I often could not get started.

We all moaned about the Slade bureaucracy—although I’m sure it’s worse now!

Kidd: I vividly remember the first few weeks of a sculpture workshop she ran in a huge studio upstairs. I was nineteen, and I had not come from a family background of going to art school or to university. I was from a working-class family, and I was terrified going into school. I have no idea what we made or what the quest was—but I remember it was chaos and someone ended up in the emergency room with an injury.

We were all these young, anxious egos, figuring out how to hold an object off the ground together because that’s what it needed. It was about working as a group in the studio, not as individuals, and how we could figure out our dynamics as a group through the act of making together. I didn’t know that in the moment, but when I look back now, that’s what that was: how we figure things out and learn together.

Sahib: Our group took the idea of artistic freedom quite literally, even by today’s standards.

There was a discussion among the tutors about how to get us back on track, and they developed “emergency crits” in which we were summoned to present work. The result was chaos: birds flying around, people undressing and putting on each other’s clothes, alarms going off. This is the kind of vibe she would allow and a testament to the time and space she made for us to experiment. But I think we confused her with our response to it all! It was a fun time, discovering ourselves through the work—she encouraged that sincerity, and she was someone I felt comfortable being vulnerable around. It was an exciting time to be a young artist.

de la Cruz: Phyllida was quite personal compared with the other teachers I had—perhaps she had a motherly side to her. She taught me to respect and follow my own practice and also to look at the world around me for inspiration.

She was able to converse about many subjects. She was a real intellect. It was a pleasure to talk to her, know her and be in her company. But at times she could be a lot to handle and quite intense. Looking back, I think it must have been difficult for her, as some of her students became very big before she did. She deserved for her fame to happen more quickly. Although perhaps in the end it did come at the right time.

Wilding: In 1984, we both applied for at the same job at Brighton Polytechnic. Phyllida got the job, but they also gave me a one-day-a-week post, which was really good money then. The train journey to Brighton from London was when Phyllida and I got to know each other, and it was often hilarious. Teaching at Brighton entailed one-to-one tutorials—there seemed to be a bunch of incredibly bright and motivated students. I had already realized that Phyllida was a superb multitasker. I could not believe she had so many children, other teaching commitments and a full-on practice in her home studio—and I never heard her complain about any of it. At the time, I don’t think I realized how tough it was for her holding it together: teaching, family and her own practice.

Woodrow: In the late 1990s, I came across a public work of hers down in the New Forest. It was a big installation in a quite remote place next to a footpath. I remember thinking it was amazing—she’s making fantastic stuff and even if no one really knows about it, she was just doing it. That really impressed me.

Woodrow: In the way she approached me and other people and talked about work, she was one of those teachers who went against the grain of many male tutors who would try to take you apart, saying, “This is rubbish. What are you doing?” with people ending up in tears. Phyllida was never like that. Whatever you thought of it, there was something that was positive. It could be really small or almost insignificant, but she would locate that and encourage you through it. That was a real difference between her and other teachers.

Kidd: I think Phyllida’s whole practice was about learning. She would say art schools aren’t just places where artists train; they are also spaces where you learn to not know, to play, to gain confidence and authority, to research through materials. We were sixty students, and we weren’t all going to go on and become artists but Phyllida allowed people to take that knowledge and experience out into whatever they were going to be.

Sahib: Once I made a mash-up video of Beyoncé performances that I edited into one mega-mix spectacle. Phyllida watched it and just didn’t know how to react. I remember someone kindly explained to her that Beyoncé was like a pastiche of Tina Turner. She had introduced me to all these amazing references—but I take credit for giving her Beyoncé!

Taylor-Johnson: Looking back, it was amazing how she understood me—knowing exactly where I should be. There was a sense of power in being seen for the first time and having someone understand my wild, esoteric ideas. She made me feel safe to be able to say: This is the wrong environment. And I could leap and bound my way out of it. It is amazing and rare when people do that for you.

Flood-Paddock: Meeting her really felt like fate. I feel very lucky.

Kidd: I remember seeing her running a workshop with a group of primary school children at her commission for Tate Britain in 2014. I think one of them was her grandchild. I remember thinking that even when she did these massive commissions she could still be found with a group of kids.

Wilding: Her teaching legacy—ask any of the hundreds of artists she has taught—is love, generosity, intellectual rigor and humor. And the excitement of making the object that leads on to the next one, in a neverending sequence of works.

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Ángela de la Cruz is a London-based artist from Galicia, Spain. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.

Jess Flood-Paddock is a sculptor living and working in London. She was recently selected for a summer residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, which took place in parallel with “Phyllida Barlow: unscripted.”

Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator based in London. From 2007 to 2021, he was senior curator of international art at Tate Modern.

Natasha Kidd is an artist living and working in the United Kingdom. She is associate vice provost for cultural and creative industries at Bath Spa University.

Prem Sahib is an artist. Their work is in the collections of the Tate; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and other institutions worldwide.

Sam Taylor-Johnson is a film director and artist. Her work includes Back to Black (2024), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and other films.

Alison Wilding is a sculptor who lives and works in London. In 2019, she was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to art.

Bill Woodrow is a sculptor. He was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 1986 and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2002.

“Phyllida Barlow: unscripted” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset through January 5, 2025.

Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963–2023 (Hauser & Wirth Publishers / Fruitmarket Gallery) is now available from Hauser & Wirth Publishers Originally published by Fruitmarket and Hatje Cantz in 2015, this new edition has been updated and expanded by curator Frances Morris.