Charlie Barlow

‘I make; they grow, proliferate and collapse - my sculptures have a fidgety life.’ 
 
Charlie crosses material boundaries, creating large-scale forms which dribble between installation, performance and painting. She exaggerates consumer objects to disrupt social order, favouring the unruly. Commodity choice is based on cleanliness to invert purpose, objects of desire to indulge form and rubbish to rebuild status: from mushy toilet rolls to shiny beads and blubbering rubber gloves. Through experimental hands-on play with these everyday things, transformation occurs. Functional basics turn into uncertain arrangements, worlds and creatures - a becoming of the ‘Other’. This spills outward into space, where speculative cartography reimagines urban memory as a network of perpetual movement. Cumulative constructions are found tangled with architecture or trespassing land, imposing upon bodily senses as they fall apart and leak. When sculptural death arrives, sticky remains linger amongst anxious piles of stuff - an environmental disaster combatted by the hoarding and reabsorption of materials into the cycle of creation. Using dark humour, Charlie makes the familiar ambiguous, undoing the distinction between nature and culture in search for alternative structures of organised chaos.

Charlie Barlow (b. Peterborough, UK) is an ecofeminist artist led by material, making and chaordic systems. She received an MA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in 2018, where she was the recipient of the Clare Winsten Memorial Award, and is currently working between Norwich and Peterborough. Recent exhibitions include You Like It, It Likes You, Outpost, Norwich (2026), Pigeon, Kabinett Gallery, Zwitschermaschine, Berlin (2025), Dino Rose TFL, Kabinett Gallery, Crystal Palace London (2025), Cabaret Melancholique, Mildmay Club, London (2025), One of Each Kind, 142 Gallery, Felixstowe (2024), Raveningham Sculpture Trail, Norfolk (2024), Now and Yesterday, Metal Culture, Peterborough (2023), Touch Me Baby, Bad Art, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London (2022), Inside Job, Tate Modern, London (2022), SPILL Festival of Performance, Ipswich (2021), Love Light Festival, Norwich (2020), The Tortoise will Reverse Itself, Academy for Visual Arts, Hong Kong (2018) and Platform 1, Bloomsbury Theatre, London (2018). She has undertaken residencies with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2014), Dyad Creative Norwich (2017), Kaitak Centre, AVA, HKBU, Hong Kong (2018), stichting NAC, Rotterdam (2023) and Studio459, Tomar, Portugal (2024/5).