Furlough and Phyllida
Installation shots of Renzo Piano and Phyllida Barlow at the Royal Academy
Readers, I have been furloughed. With so much pain and anger in the world at the moment, it really isn’t much of a hardship to have a paid month off, and I can’t complain, but it’s been a strange thing to get my head around. An inspirational friend and colleague once told me that being a curator isn’t a career it’s a lifestyle choice, and I realise even more how much my job bleeds into my life. And I like it that way. I (perhaps sadly) spend the vast amount of my time thinking about art, science, museums, and that doesn’t stop when I’m off the museum clock.
So, what can I plan for furlough? I want to try and get a balance between being productive and making the most of this rare long break: going for walks, reading and listening to new things, doing some writing. One thing that I’ve been doing during lockdown, and the beginning of furlough, is slowly moving old blogs over onto this new site. It turns out there were nearly 300 of them since I first started this blog in 2011, and I really enjoyed going back over old thoughts and experiences. It also made me realise that I blog far less now than I used to, and one resolution is to write some posts during furlough about shows and visits about which I wish I’d commented at the time.
On my first furlough day, I decided to go for a long walk in the sunshine and start listening to a brilliant new podcast that has been on my list – Sculpting Lives by Jo Baring and Sarah Victoria Turner, which is looking at the lives of modern and contemporary women sculptors. I was particularly struck by the episode discussing Phyllida Barlow and how the presenters dwelt on how her work plays with space and volume, working with the gallery space that it inhabits.
Their words conjured beautifully Barlow’s show at the Royal Academy in 2019 Cul-de-Sac, which I was lucky to see almost empty, within the first minutes of its opening day, after a bloggers’ early view of the Bill Viola/Michelangelo. It was an arresting use of the new top-lit galleries in the Burlington Gardens building, forcing the visitor to negotiate the space, the eye constantly drawn upwards by Barlow’s urgent forms.
Yet, I also particularly enjoyed it in contrast to the previous show in these galleries, Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings, which made a completely different use of space, filling the rooms with low tables covered with detailed models for Piano’s architectural projects. I always love the architecture room at the Summer Show each year, and there is something about the exquisite detail of the models, combined with the imaginative space of sketches that really speaks to me.
There was something awe-inspiring about going from these spaces of minute detail to Barlow’s monumental structures, that made you lift your head and draw breath, in the way that a forest or a cliff-top might do. Remembering that feeling while listening to Sculpting Lives and gazing at a sunny avenue of trees was a pretty good start to a month where I similarly hope to lift my head and appreciate the privilege of this time to think.