[Phyllida Barlow: Homemade]
My mother was very creative:
knitting, dressmaking, sewing.
I love the way she would teach me
how to make dolls house furniture
out of discarded matchboxes.
Very simple, ad hoc ways of doing things.
The antithesis of the toy shop,
everything was about resourcing it within the home.
When I was at art school,
there were so many rights and wrongs
about techniques, about processes, about forms,
even about ideas.
And all sorts of things were taboo,
like domesticity, or certain crafts
that were perhaps associated with women,
like knitting or sewing.
It was the big, heavy traditions of sculpture
that were important to learn,
and I wasn't that good at them.
Years later, my teaching was very influenced
by not going towards the right/wrong approach
but trying to find things that could really
unravel something quite idiosyncratic to that student.
You know, what were their aspirations?
What was going on in their head?
And then being able to invite them
to start thinking about processes
that would reflect those desires and ambitions.
My teaching was very much to do
with what I felt I had missed at art school.
I've got five children.
They're all nearly in their forties now.
And I think I wanted to carry on that positive sense
that my mother had, that they could have happy lives
and do what they wanted to do,
that they weren't obliged to fulfill
some higher expectation. [LAUGHS]
They all make art.
Our third daughter, she's an HIV nurse in London.
So she's got a sensible job,
but she paints a lot, which is amazing.
There are plenty of artists who don't have exhibitions.
There's plenty of art that's never seen.
And I think I'm intrigued by that.
Making work that does not have a destination
has its loneliness and its sadness about it.
And many artists endure that for their entire lives,
and it's heroic.
The novel that never gets published,
should it never have been written?
Of course it should be.
It's making a fantastic contribution
to culture of the moment
because that individual has that huge urge to do that
without any other qualifying pressures.
Those are my sort of private thoughts
that I think there's a lot about the art world
and the way we experience art
that's fantastic, but I think there's a lot
that's not entirely spoken about or recognized,
which is the unseen and the unknown
and the creative act as a deeply private experience.
There is this great, powerful desire
to just create something.
And does that just get eroded away?
I hope not. [LAUGHS]