Phyllida Barlow: Peninsula
Until April 17; Baltic, Gateshead

Phyllida Barlow’s shows come and go, and so does her sculpture. Put together from everyday materials such as foam, plywood and tape, her work lives for one exhibition, and then goes on the scrap-heap.

Baltic is currently home to a ramshackle collection of new structures by Barlow, like a city built, graffitoed and abandoned. It has that lived-in feel, as if the grand plan is long lost and this motley collection of surviving buildings is left to disintegrate and accumulate at will.

Every concoction has a character of its own. The room is split in two by Barlow’s enormous red-taped barrier, much like an office block might dominate a small town. Once you’re past it, it feels almost like a forgotten wall. This new space is owned by a thing on wooden legs, towering six metres above you. Despite its height, the spindly creature isn’t threatening. If you venture close to it, you can look up its skirts to see the harmless polystyrene blocks atop the legs.

Barlow hired assistants to assemble these pieces, recreating what she had devised in her London studio. It’s hard to get your head round this fact, because of the sheer messiness of the artist’s work. The daubed colours and spontaneous forms suggest a deeply expressionistic approach to making art. The domestic materials and careful balance imply a personal touch.

Barlow’s relationship with the personal touch, the unmistakeable fingerprint, is ambiguous. Like so many sculptors, her most basic instinct is to shape clay with her hands. At the same time she remains suspicious of the emotive power contained in the clawing fingerprint.

None of her work is carved or cast into being; it’s heaped, stuffed, knotted and squashed. Barlow’s sculptures are not things of beauty, and studying photographs of them won’t get you very far in appreciating them. The way to understand the work is to get in there and move around it. What’s in that giant jiffy bag? Bend down and have a look. What’s behind that monolithic barrier? Walk around it and discover the other side.

The more you move, the more you get into step with the artist’s physical question and answer session. Something is bulging out of a huge black cylinder, and you’ll only see what it is by heading for the balcony. When you find a bank of pink tables, holes cut out of them, between you and a heap of scrap, you should keep moving. As you do, the holes frame a gliding panorama of the junkyard landscape behind.

Once you leave the gallery, stay curious. That’s what art’s about.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 30.01.05