Phyllida Barlow to install sculpture in Highgate Cemetery
A 2019 untitled work by Phyllida Barlow, made from cement, hessian scrim, paint, plywood, polycotton, spray paint, steel and timber (image: The Guardian).
A Phyllida Barlow sculpture, evoking ideas of memorialisation and Victorian Britain’s relationship to death, is to be installed in Highgate Cemetery this summer.
Titled Act, Barlow’s sculpture is a stage that includes a “tower of fabric wrapped poles” that are enclosed within “concrete screed panels flecked with colourful paint”. It will be installed in the the open-air courtyard of the North London Victorian graveyard’s West Cemetery.
“It’s responding to our relationship to cemeteries and this Victorian idea of death as something absolutely monumental that needs monuments to honour it in this very correct, profound way,” Barlow said. “I suppose I’ve taken the theatrical aspect of that to create a kind of stage.”
Act will be 5.6m tall, 5m deep and 7m wide. The piece was originally commissioned by the not–for–profit arts organisation Studio Voltaire in 2019 for the Nunhead Cemetery, but was moved to Highgate after the structure it was supposed to occupy was deemed unsafe. The design was scaled up by 3m in order to fit its new site.
“I hope it looks in a way very fake,” said Barlow, who represented the UK at the 2017 Venice Art Biennale. “I’m interested in fakery and pretend I like the theatrical issues that that raises, but also slightly misplaced in relationship to the more intentional objects, such as the mausoleums that Highgate is so famous for.”
Studio Voltaire said that Act will “create an imposing, sepulchral form”, but said that an exposed supporting framework would “reveal stage–set properties, undermining any initial appearance of monumentality”.
The sculpture will be installed over the course of a week, before remaining at the cemetery for six weeks. “It’s a complicated site because it’s Grade I-listed, even though we’re not doing anything permanent,” said Joe Scotland, Voltaire’s artistic director.
Barlow has said that the sculpture will explore the visual language of memorial, tombs and gravestones. “What is the message that’s within those forms, and why use this classical architecture?” she said. “Why is that so important to the commemoration of death – it intrigues me.”
Story source: The Guardian