Charlie Barlow exaggerates familiar everyday objects, 'othering' the known through an experimental hand making process. Inert readymades such as toilet rolls, post-it notes and straws take on uncontrollable living states, resting on the borderline of construction and deconstruction, order and chaos, beauty and disgust. Their status never wants to settle; binary oppositions characteristic of the way we see the world remain in flux. Diverse in placement, scale, colour, texture, scent, sound and touch, the works seek to disturb bodily senses and the psyche in a time where technological mediation and commodity representation prevails. With little respect for borders, positions or rules, their deviant behaviour is unrestrained – things intrude public space and sticky substances attach themselves to the feet of passers by – chance encounters are open. Temporal in nature, the sculptures remain only in memories, photographs and material fragments; mirroring the human condition they refuse monumental fixity, playfully challenging the traditions of permanent sculpture.
​The choice of materials point to order, cleanliness and consumption and, more broadly, boundaries; bodily, social and spatial. Underpinned by intersectional ecofeminism, Charlie animates synthetic materials to break down the divide between the 'natural' and artificial', subject and object, offering space to consider accepted constructs, interlocking structures of power, value systems and notions of identity.