Phyllida Barlow, the sculptor representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, has said that while it may have taken the art world decades to pay attention to her work, the timing of her recognition was perfect, adding: “20 years ago, I wouldn’t have coped.”

Barlow has been making her vast and ramshackle sculptures for more than five decades but her work went almost completely ignored until 10 years ago. She landed a show at the Serpentine Gallery in London and then at the Tate in 2014, though her Venice exhibition, Folly, is Barlow’s most prominent platform yet.

Barlow, 73, bears no grudge that she spent decades being neglected by both commercial and public galleries. She said she could never have handled the pressures and responsibilities of representing the UK at Venice earlier in her career.

“To put it bluntly, I think the timing has been, for me, perfect,” said Barlow. “I’m ready for it and the work’s ready for it. It’s ready to fulfil all sorts of ambitions I want for the work. Not for myself – I’m not particularly interested in myself – but I’m interested in what the work can do ... I can now be confident that things do go wrong but can also be retrieved.”

Barlow’s towering grey sculptures of concrete, chicken wire, polystyrene and paint fill the opening room of the British pavilion, and her uneven bulbous baubles spill out on to the porch and garden surrounding the venue.

She said her initial awe at being asked to represent the UK – something she had “never even considered on my radar” – had given way to a certain frustration that came from operating in the strict territorial confines of the Biennale.

“I had a very gung ho approach, I didn’t know the rules, and I was very astonished, in an arrogant kind of way, that I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted to do, which is spill into what it turned out is Italian territory,” said Barlow, laughing.

Part of Barlow’s Folly installation in Venice. Photograph: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

With the British pavilion framed by the German pavilion on one side and the French pavilion on the other, she said negotiating which flowerbeds and bushes belonged to which had become “very farcical” against the backdrop of Brexit.

“That sense of honour and huge privilege morphed into getting slightly fixated on the word ‘representing’ and wondering how as an individual, how could I possibly represent Great Britain,” said Barlow. “So in a way there was a slightly melancholic tone to how I set about the work.”

Barlow is particularly adamant that while the subject of her work isn’t political, much of it was made in the summer of last year and the mood of Brexit Britain seeped indelibly into the sculptures, which are both ominous and precarious.

They might be lollipops, or they might be things that are about to explode Barlow on her work

In the diary she kept during the making of the show, which is printed in the exhibition catalogue, she laments how the “news is horrible” and says “what about Venice now, post referendum”.

Brexit did not change the direction of her Venice show, she said, as she was already in “a questioning, slightly moody frame of mind about how artists reflect the times they live in”.

However, she said: “To me, all artists are political, even if that isn’t the subject of the work – and it isn’t the subject of my work – but anyone who takes action as an individual is somehow politicising themselves in some way.”

For Barlow the joy of her work is all in the act of making and she will willingly admit that the sculptures are not of anything in particular, bowing instead to the materials.

“The action of making the work, rather than being able to name what those bulbous shapes are, is much more what the work is about,” she said. “They might be lollipops for all I know, or they might be things that are about to explode.”

With a modesty that is typical of Barlow, she described her own repertoire as “limited” but also conceded that even after five decades of working with the same materials, she was not bored, and that concrete, polythene, polystyrene and wire netting still had the capacity to surprise her.

Barlow credits her late-blooming career to a boredom with the “young British artists” mentality. The YBA movement gripped the art world in the late 1980s and kept a stranglehold on it for more than 20 years, but it eventually wore thin, Barlow said. It has led curators recently to look to the past in search of forgotten artists – many of whom were women.

“Women are being looked at a lot more now and that’s great,” said Barlow. “I think maybe I was just there at the right place, at the right time – being old and ‘unknown’ – even though I’ve been showing my work my whole life.”