For Phyllida Barlow, Britain’s representative at Venice Biennale 2017, fame was 40 years coming

Barlow hit the big time after retiring from four decades of teaching; now showing in Venice, the sculptor talks about young artists’ rush for stardom and how she’s never sought sympathy as a mother

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Phyllida Barlow pictured at the British Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where her Folly show is on display until November 26.

Enid Tsui

Published: 2:31pm, 9 Jun 2017Updated: 3:11pm, 12 Jun 2017

It wasn’t what you would expect for Phyllida Barlow’s opening party at this year’s Venice Biennale.

At the 17th-century Palazzo Pisani a Santo Stefano, huge mounds of shaved ham and salami were dotted around the baroque interior, blazing red and orange lights fuelling carnivorous urges. Meanwhile, elegantly dressed VIPs shoved fistfuls of meat into their mouths on the way to the overflowing buffet table, inhibition loosened by the unlimited flow of cocktails, while a desperate crowd had gathered in the stairwell, begging the bouncers to be let in. It was a bacchanal without the sex.

Barlow’s Folly show is about unpredictability and losing control.

In person, the 73-year-old sculptor comes across as pensive and scholarly. She speaks with quiet conviction about art, as she would have done during her 40-plus years as a teacher at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. Showy is not a word that springs to mind when considering her artistic practice. In fact, she spent decades in relatively obscurity and only became famous after retiring from teaching in 2009. “Phyllida Barlow: an artistic outsider who has finally come inside” was The Guardian’s headline when the British Council picked her for Venice.

That doesn’t mean her art lacks ambition. She often works on an architectural scale: huge, lumbering, superficially crude installations using everyday materials such as salvaged planks, cardboard, fabric and polystyrene. What she has put in the British Pavilion rebels against its staid, safe, neoclassical shell: precarious-looking columns, an intervening wall made from salvaged boards, a balcony inside a room. So perhaps the party is quite apt. Her show is called “Folly”, after all, and it is about losing control.