Lilah Forever

I meet up with the artist Lilah Fowler at a café in Crouch End, London, to discuss her forthcoming show at the Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh. The once Victorian suburb is an oasis of boutiques and artisan bakers in the North London sprawl. This is where Fowler spent her formative years before moving to Edinburgh to study sculpture, returning for a masters at the Royal College of Art

She’s brought along her laptop to take me through some images of her most recent works, a taster of what will be on display in Edinburgh next month. Firstly, there is Untitled (light pink and turquoise space frame); with Untitled (yellow and turquoise space frame): autonomous, geometric steel frames joined together to form a complex, spatio-linear drawing that interacts with the architecture of the gallery. Each frame is painted in a way that allows it to imperceptibly change colour depending on the viewer’s position. Long triangular frames will spill from the mezzanine floor of the gallery to interact with the forms below.

As if this were not enough, she introduces another series of works to be represented in the show: beautiful abstract forms made from light-weight plastic, delicately folded and coated in a felt-like material. One in particular, a white wall-mounted piece, has the near weightlessness of paper and yet the gravitational permanence of landscape. As she takes me through each work in the series I get a clearer insight into her working process and how each piece comes about from the one before, gradually increasing in complexity.

Trying to impress, I ask a painfully pretentious, and what is more, blisteringly awful question about her being a woman making minimalist art – having assumed this was in some way against the status quo. Unwilling to just leave it alone, I talk myself further into a chauvinistic cesspit before being subtly goaded out by the light of Fowler’s measured rationality. Her works examine space, perception, colour and architecture, and although aware of her relationship to an art historical context, she is far from hung up on it. And why would she be? This is an artist engaged in a remarkable process, investigating diverse sculptural forms, encouraging them to interact with each other and their environment. I can only encourage you to engage with them too.