Phyllida Barlow has returned to her Tyneside birthplace to create a series of major sculptures which are unlikely to survive when the exhibition closes. The artist talks to Viv Hardwick about why she's finally worrying about her recycled art policy at the age of 60.

NEWCASTLE-BORN Phyllida Barlow is famous on the art circuit for creating sculptures and installations which are dismantled and destroyed at the end of each exhibition.

That's the current fate which awaits nine works currently dominating the Level 4 space of Gateshead's Baltic home of contemporary art with an exhibition called Peninsula, set to run until April 17.

Barlow believes in low-tec and mundane materials like concrete posts, polystyrene, plywood, brown felt and sellotape in a piece called Barrier, which dominates the area at four metres high and 13 metres long.

But now she's 60, and made reusable art for 40 years, Barlow admits that she is beginning to question merely capturing each piece of art on camera.

The professor of Fine Art and director of Undergraduate Studies at London's The Slade School of Fine Arts says: "I think there is this issue that so many people have mentioned now I'm 60, it seems to be something that people are talking about and I have to look at how some kind of analogue of the work might be generated. Either as a version of that work or some such process.

"I certainly do a lot of drawing and I suppose they are the enduring part of the work at the moment, but that's very different from an object and from the sculpture."

Asked if it breaks her heart to destroy each piece, some of which have taken years to develop, she replies "There are two answers to that question, I have a small studio next to my house (in London) and I have a yard where I do a lot of the work, but I don't want to have to spend money on storing art.

"The secondary reason is that,, to me what I make is more about the event than the idea of permanent object-making or monument-making or sculpture."

Barlow stresses the point that artists in the US and Europe have created art like this for many years and adds: "It's not something that breaks my heart because it allows other work to be done, it clears the air and allows the material to be recycled and all sorts of possibilities are available... for me, I'm not suggesting that everybody has to work in this way." Fortunately the woman, who regularly gives talks at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities and looks in on work done at Sunderland University, does have a vast collection of drawings which do survive.

"I can't think without drawing. It's quite peculiar I have to have a sketchbook and a pen with me. I feel as though I have an arm missing without them," she says and calls herself 'a doer who thinks rather than a thinker who does'.

But what if somebody walked into the Baltic and offered her a fair price for a piece of work, would she accept?

She laughs and replies: "I think I would have to because I think the idea would be that this event could be put on again. It would be dismantled and installed again from scratch and I would have to set up a rigorous specification and there are artists who have done that... but not as one homogenous lump."

Speaking of lumps, it is a little alarming of hear of a 13 metre high sculptures at the Baltic dubbed as "appears to be on the point of dangerous collapse".

Barlow confesses: "It's held together by sellotape, so the feeling is maybe if you cut the tape that things will slither to the floor. There is a fragility despite the massiveness."

Surprisingly, she agrees immediately that there is an element of Health & Safety risk about Peninsula "I am really worried about this bag I've created which holds a huge roll of lead. It is safely attached to the floor as it can be, but it would only take just one unattended child to destroy that piece in literally two seconds and probably cause themselves an injury. "I'm trying the whole time to work out what an exhibition is.

Is it the bums on seats principle of the customer knows best or is there the need for the artist to say 'if the customer mess with this work, it'll fight back'? Not because I intend that because I loathe the kind of art which tricks you into some ghastly dark room with electrodes, I really hate all that, when you see something it should show you something or tell you something.

"I also think this mysterious group called 'the people' or 'the public' are perfectly willing to accept quite extraordinary images in advertising and I can't understand why, when it becomes art, causes such enormous problems."

Until recently, Barlow saw her artistic opportunities in Tyneside as tenuous. That was until the Baltic's offer came along. She says: "I suppose my feelings about Newcastle and that space on the top floor of the Baltic is that it looks up and down the Tyne and the space reminds me of a land mass that is isolated, hence the title Peninsula. The view you gain is kind of dislocated and remote and I've always loved spits of land, oddly enough they are all down the East coast of England, in Norfolk and Yorkshire where you can walk out on a spit of land and get water on both sides. There's something very isolating about that, and the objects left behind in these places, usually with a marine identity, have made a huge impression on me." All it needs now is for a far-sighted, and hard-hatted, individual to finally find a permanent place for Barlow's work in the North-East.

Peninsula runs at the Baltic until Sunday, April 17. To reserve a place on Phyllida Barlow's Sixth Form Student's Masterclass on Janury 29, 10am-3pm, free, ring 0191-478 1810 or email: events@balticmill.com Objects For... And Other Things b Phyllida Barlow is available from the Baltic shop and a book about Peninsula will be published towards the end of January

Published: 02/12/2004