The English artist Phyllida Barlow has been inducted into the Order of the British Empire and was made a CBE for her services to the arts in the Queen’s New Year’s honors.

Barlow is known for her sculptures, created using found low-cost materials including cardboard, fabric, timber, and polystyrene which she typically arranges into large and colorful three-dimensional collages.

During her studies at the Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Art in the 1960s where she specialized in sculpture, she shunned the traditional methods of carving and casting, experimenting instead with construction material.

Phyllida Barlow Dock (2014) installation view at the Tate, Britain.
Photo: Alex Delfanne via Art Fund

In 2014 she told the Telegraph “What I love about these very available materials—cement, plaster, clay and all the rest of it—is that the less you handle them, the more for me there is a sense of the moment trapped in them. The material does its own thing and you can’t argue with it!”

In 2010 Barlow had a major museum show at London’s Serpentine gallery and in 2011 she was inducted into the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2014 the Tate Britain commissioned her to create a work for the museum’s Duveen Galleries. That same year Hauser & Wirth also showed a retrospective of Barlow’s drawings.

Installation view, Phyllida Barlow. Fifty Years of Drawings (2014)
Photo: Alex Delfanne via Hauser & Wirth, London

Barlow has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of young artists, due in no small part to her role as a professor at the Slade School of Fine Art. Two of her students—Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz—went on the earn Turner Prize nominations.

The 71-year-old sculptor from Newcastle lives and works in London. Her work is included in the collections of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; the New Museum, New York; and the Des Moines Art Centre. She is a mother of five, and her son Eddie Peake is a successful artist in his own right.

Other honorees for services to art include Pamela Jane Baxter, deputy director, National Portrait Gallery; Anita Zabludowicz, collector and philanthropist; Claire Doherty, founder of the public art organization Situations; and Helen Marriage, founder of the public art organization Artichoke.