Phyllida Barlow: Staging an Occupation @ The Fruitmarket

 Platitudes like 'those who can’t, teach' find exception in such a phenomenal and modest artist as Phyllida Barlow, who has educated the likes of Tacita Dean, Rachel Whiteread and Douglas Gordon. The day before this exhibition opened to the public, the clatter of drills and the thuds of distance hammers and ladders surrounded her monumental sculptures. It was easy to see that this exhibition was a labour intensive task.

Fruitmarket Gallery has been taken over, embraced and turned on its head. The initial sculptures you see on entering appear to have their backs to you, showing you their buttresses and support mechanisms – there is no fakery here; the physical practice of sculpture itself is on show and, shocking as it is, it encourages you to investigate further.

Viewing the work upstairs first seems to make sense – the other sculptures face away from you on entering, as if they are not yet ready to be seen. The overwhelming monumental scale of the work upstairs is what hits you first: an apparent castle of sorts – perhaps an oversized treasure trove – kidnaps the gallery floor, leaving visitors with only a small pathway around the domineering sculpture to walk. So you walk – looking for a hole in the wall of the piece, peering around crevasses and nooks, wondering, 'What is inside this thing?' Completing a loop around, you start again. There is something personal about the work, silent and dumb, menacing. There is a real experience of being excluded from what is inside.

This space within a space, the horrendously oversized sculpture, gives the sense of something forgotten or lost, unbelonging. There is something missing within it: objects – the pieces that would make this architectural rather than objectual, a home rather than an abandoned a house. These objects can be found downstairs, where rather than a frustrating closed-off encounter as upstairs, exploration and openness become key. It is as if the object from above has deposited these smaller, more intimate sculptures downstairs.

Barlow has an obvious love of theatre. There is a constant feeling that you are being shown the things you are not supposed to be shown as viewers – the methods behind her sculptures, a feeling of being 'behind the scenes'. She manages to immerse you into a completely obscure realm of sculpture and fakery, while keeping you aware that it is all a show and that these objects are made, as previously mentioned, with labour.

The downstairs set of sculptures are highly unusual. While the upstairs domineering piece speaks a similar language to that of Whiteread’s concrete House, these objects each have their own individual language. Each piece downstairs relates to a flat object at the back, and these still objects act as protagonists, waiting, dormant. It is as if they are awaiting their own queue in a performance each with their own stage set. Again, Barlow seems to be referencing the theatrical. With such a generous exhibition of pieces downstairs, and a frustratingly overwhelming experience upstairs, this exhibition turns traditional sculptural stereotypes and art interactions on their heads. Everything is laid bare for the viewer to see, there is no fakery, but plenty of whimsy here.