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Charlie Barlow

Peterborough
Charlie Barlow (b. Peterborough, UK) is an installation artist and art teacher, living and working in Peterborough.
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‘I make; they grow, proliferate and collapse - my sculptures have a fidgety life. They’re sneaky too.’

Charlie materially explores boundaries, creating forms which dribble between sculpture, painting and performance. She exaggerates consumer objects to disrupt the controls of social order, favouring the free and unruly. Commodity choice is based on cleanliness to invert purpose, objects of desire to indulge form and rubbish to rebuild status, moving from mushy toilet rolls to shiny beads and blubbering rubber gloves. Through experimental hands on play with these everyday things, a transformation occurs; functional basics turn into uncertain arrangements, worlds and creatures; a becoming of the ‘Other’. Found tangled with architecture or trespassing grounds, bodily senses are imposed upon. Cumulative constructions expand as they fall apart and leak. When sculptural death arrives, sticky remains linger amongst anxious piles of stuff - an environmental disaster. Charlie uses dark humour to make the identifiable ambiguous, undoing the distinctions between nature and culture in search for alternative structures of organised chaos. 

 

Freight Architecture

Labels

Parched Limbs (Infant)

Phalanges (Light)

Mong Kok 5000 (The Uselessness of Heaven and Earth)

A Pile of Me and You

Blanket

Phalanges

Featured in

Curated

Highlights: 7 - 13 October, 2024

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