ART CITIES:London-Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson is an artist, poet and musician who lives and works in London. Her work spans, and regularly combines, a range of media, from video, sculpture and installation to audio and web-based projects. Last summer she unveiled her sculpture for the Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square, titled “THE END” a nine-tonne steel-and-polystyrene swirl of cream garnished with a cherry, a fly and a camera-equipped drone (until spring 2022).

By Efi Michalarou

Photo: Tate Archive

Audacious and disconcerting, Heather Phillipson’s expansive, multimedia projects include video, sculpture, installation, music, poetry and digital media. Described by the artist as ‘quantum thought-experiments’, her works often carry a sense of latent threat – a feeling that received ideas, images, and the systems that underpin them may be on the verge of collapse. Presented for the annual Tate Britain Commission, which invites contemporary artists to respond to the space of the central Duveen Galleries, Heather Phillipson created “RUPTURE NO l: blowtorching the bitten peach”, which is one of the most transformative commissions to date. Heather Phillipson has reimagined the spaces, in her own words, as a sequence of “charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms”. She proposes that the galleries are alive and exist in a parallel time-zone. Engulfed by sound, color and motion, the three interconnected spaces are populated with mutant life-forms, built from technological remains. Phillipson’s practice often involves collisions of wildly different imagery, materials and media that conjure absurd and complex systems. Entering the Duveens, visitors are confronted with bisected aircraft fuel tanks, piled aggregates and vast, hand-painted clouds. In the center, multiple animal eyes glitch across screens emerging from mountains of salt. Further along, visitors encounter various makeshift creatures – a papier­mache ram, modified diesel bowsers, and insects hammered together from roof vents, car dipsticks and reused steel. In the final space, sand overflows from a collapsed silo, filled with gas canisters that clang like a wind-chime. Rotating anchors and emergency foil blankets are doused in projected light. Each of the three spaces is demarcated by a precise dosage of color, marking the transition between zones. Augmented animal sounds reverberate throughout.

Photo: Heather Phillipson, my name is lettie eggsyrub, still from multi-screen video installation, 2018, commissioned by Art on the Underground,  image courtesy the artist

Info: Tate Britain, Millbank, London, England, Duration: 17/5/2021-23/1/2022, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00 (Timed tickets are required for all visitors), www.tate.org.uk