Over the past decade, Phyllida Barlow has deservedly moved from being a cult artist to exhibiting on the international circuit. This year saw a triple bill from the septuagenarian, including a retrospective of drawings at Hauser & Wirth in London and the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s new venue in Somerset, but by far the most important of the three shows was the Duveen Galleries commission at Tate Britain. For a sculptor, this is one of the most visible platforms in the country—essentially a long, cavernous hall with vaulted ceilings from which various galleries radiate. Barlow’s

Mary Reid Kelley’s nearly nine-minute black-and-white video Swinburne’s Pasiphae, 2014, and its accompanying handmade props and drawings constitute the second installment in the artist’s ongoing trilogy based on the life of the Minotaur, that infamous half-man, half-bull of Greek mythology. As she has with each of her increasingly complex and distinctive video works to date incorporating animation with live action, Reid Kelley again weaves a multilayered narrative full of blink-and-you-miss-it literary and artistic allusions and clever wordplay. The video is highly stylized yet utterly captivating.

One line in the 1959 Situationist film from which Mary Kelly’s exhibition “On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Period of Time” took its name hovered over the show: “When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself.” Take Circa 1968, 2004, around which the show revolved: a large-scale cast that took some six months to make from the lint of roughly ten thousand pounds of laundry collected from a tumble dryer (using a process Kelly devised in 1999). The piece depicts Jean-Pierre Rey’s iconic image for Life magazine taken