"I'm like a director and they are the cast"

Global Britain is a 1.3m illuminated sphere. Around its perimeter, animal-human hybrids of the kind that might have leapt out of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam, stand in a queue beneath a ring of flickering street lamps. It’s a mind-blowing scene. “I was interested in the dynamic of who queues, who doesn’t, and the passive acceptance of that structure,” says artist Barnaby Barford of the central piece in his new exhibition We Are Where We Are, featuring 35 sculptures and large-scale drawings, which opened 1 May at London’s David Gill Gallery. 

The piece is a portal into the inner workings of Barford’s mind. He is known for gathering fragments, often using ceramics, and combining them to give life to new forms: from Frankenstein-esque sculptures to monumental pieces and drawings that use a single word in repetition. His narrative art – spanning sculpture, drawing and painting to film and installation – is deliciously subversive: a means of cultural critique, and a reflection on life and politics, which is delivered with a dark sense of humour. The final output is complex, multilayered: what first produces a smile quickly gives way to an examination of the human condition, consumption and societal desires – what the V&A describes as an exploration carrying on a tradition of Hogarth, Chaucer, Dickens and Shakespeare.

Barford’s humour is an ice-breaker. “It allows you to talk about heavy subjects but also slightly takes the viewer aback, which puts their guard down,” he says. “Humour is great because it leaves you open to thinking about the work in a different way, when being confrontational can be a turn-off. I would quite like my work to be welcoming, non-intimidating. A lot of art is a power struggle – between you and the piece – but my art is for everyone, and I’d like to think it works on lots of different levels.”

For his David Gill show, the British-born artist has returned to the medium of found porcelain figurines after a 14-year hiatus – an assortment of kitsch that he picks up on eBay, in markets and vintage stores, which are subsequently decapitated and reconfigured into scenes that explore themes that have been marinating in his mind. His current body of work examines, “where we stand a quarter of the way through the 21st century” – an era when real-life events can feel like parody.

This sense of instability is explored in two further large-scale pieces. Scream To Go Faster is a two-metre-high sculpture shaped like a tornado, in which figures cling to a spiraling mass of broken china, some of them happy, oblivious to the maelstrom that surrounds them, while others teeter on the edge ready to fall. “There’s a force that’s hard to step outside of,” says Barford of the piece. “Things feel increasingly fast, increasingly out of our control. We’re carried along whether we like it or not.” A second illuminated sputnik-like globe sculpture, Feast, invites the viewer to a celebration. His characters are seated at various tables surrounded by bunting and balloons – bottles and cake strewn across the floor around them. It’s a joyous but fractured scene: one of wanton excess – and the feeling that it could all unravel at any moment.

When I speak to Barford at his East London studio, these larger works have already been shipped to the gallery in preparation for his show, leaving gaps on the steel shelves lining the walls. There is one piece that he’s still working on entitled Tweakment: a mirror with a frame composed of broken shards of plates. “It’s from a series of concave mirrors,” he says, walking over to the piece and holding it aloft. “Basically from a distance it turns the world upside down.”

Barford has worked in this space for 16 years, and employs two part-time assistants. “I’m here everyday from nine-to-five. It’s disciplined. I have a family and kids, so I quite like treating it like a job,” he says. “I enjoy the work – the graft, the doing. It’s a process that allows your thoughts to percolate and the art to take shape.” 

The artist listens to podcasts and programmes that keep him abreast of current affairs and help him gestate ideas. But he is never alone: a motley crew of porcelain princesses, statesman, chubby cherubs and animals peer from the shelves around him – an ever-attentive audience that one imagines might spring to life as soon as the humans are not around. Barford calls them his cast: “I see them as people because I am making work about people,” he says. “My role is like that of a director or a casting director – they have had this other life and now they are all waiting to be recast in a story or a film.”  

His characters also play a role in how his work develops. “I will have ideas developing around a subject, such as what is happening in pharmaceuticals, but I’m also spending lots of time looking for figurines, which I have to respond to,” he says. “I like that constraint. I might find a figure and he could be the pharmacy guy, and that gets me thinking, maybe he could be in a sweet shop selling drugs, which is how I start building a piece.” 

In the case of Feast, one of the largest pieces in his show, hundreds of figures went into making the characters seated at each table, all carefully considered before Barford set about combining different aspects of different figures. “I’ll buy different heads and start cutting them up, everything changes with a tilt of a neck or a gesture of a hand, and as soon as you put the two things together, there’s a narrative, a new dialogue. Then you’ll put them next to something surprising like a robot and another dialogue is triggered,” he says.

Barford is fond of his figurines despite vowing “never, ever” to work with them again 14 years ago, when he cleared the shelves of his studio, giving hundreds of pieces to charity. This followed an intensive period of output, during which time the artist produced works such as Damaged Goods (2008), which was funded by the Arts Council England and commissioned by Animate Projects – a stop-frame animation for Channel 4 exploring forbidden love and class divides played out with figurines in the corner of an antiques shop.

He enjoys the metamorphosis. “I like that found objects are all made by different hands, they have all had a previous life and I guess they had very different intentions for their lives,” he says. “What is exciting is that it doesn’t feel like going back. It just feels like I’ve picked it up again and I know what I want to explore after this exhibition, so I'm sticking with it for a while. Once I get into something it becomes quite obsessive – because it has to be.”

That obsessive approach begins before the hands-on process. Barford is an artist who goes down rabbit holes with exhaustive intent, gathering masses of “data” to inform his work. For The Tower of Babel (2015), which was composed of 3,000 individual, unique bone china shops and displayed in London’s V&A, the artist photographed over 6,000 shop fronts, cycling over 1,000 miles to visit every postcode in London. The photographs were created as ceramic transfers and fired onto fine bone china to produce the individual shops. 

His fascination subsequently turned to the apple: a visual manifestation of our incessant need for more, which he has explored through various forms. More, More, More (2019) took the form of the apple tree in The Garden of Eden: a 3m-high installation, laden with 92 bone china apples emblazoned with words such as  love, money, sex and power…When picked, each apple would snap from the tree, involving the apple-picker in a re-enactment of the downfall of mankind. He also produced a series of giant fibre-glass apples, his research taking him down a path of discovery. “As I started looking into it, I realised that it was Adam and Eve but also the judgement of Paris, Heracles, Steve Jobs, Newton, Snow White, William Tell. It was Magritte, Cézanne and the Beatles. It was even the American Frontier,” he told one publication at the time. “I realised it has been a symbol of love, division, immortality and death. Of sin and redemption.” And if anyone doubts the depth of his obsession, one might want to read his book, The Apple is Everything, published by ACC Art Books.

“When I was younger I’d look at other artists and think I should do that one thing – and do it obsessively – because people see that, recognise it and then say, ‘Oh, that work, it's so-and-so,’” he says, when asked about his deep dives. “But what happens with me is that I get into something and I’m absolutely obsessed, but then I’m done, it’s out of my system.” He pauses and reflects. “I didn’t know what that was until I had my boys who have ADHD – it’s quite interesting what those traits are. I’ve done loads of amazing things but just got to the point where I thought, ‘I want to do something else now’. I was comfortable in making that work but wasn’t dreaming what it could mean.”

He is, however, dreaming of what his ensemble of figurines might become next. “I want to look into the Commedia dell'arte and Dante’s Inferno,” he says with a flash of a smile that gives away his excitement. “But this body of work feels important now for me. I hate the phrase: ‘We are what we are’. It’s resignation. It's an acceptance of the hierarchy and the structure of the way we live – and the idea you can’t do anything about it, so shut-up and get on with it,” he says. “Every time you look at the newspaper or turn on the TV – it’s like shit what now! You can’t believe what is going on and then the next day is outdone by something else – and within a week you can’t even remember what you were outraged about.” Whatever Barford has to say about that, his cast is quietly assembled in his studio, waiting for their cue…