Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson is a British artist working in a variety of media including video, sculpture, electronic music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022. Her work has been presented at major venues internationally and she has received multiple awards for her artwork, videos and poetry, including the Film London Jarman Award in 2016.^[1] She is also an acclaimed poet whose writing has appeared widely online, in print and broadcast.

Exhibitions

Phillipson has held solo exhibitions at major galleries and locations internationally, including the annual Duveen Galleries commission at Tate Britain in 2021 and the 13th commission for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, where her sculpture The End was installed from 2020 to 2022.^[2]^[3]

Other notable solo exhibitions include: a major commission for the 80-metre-long unused platform at Gloucester Road Underground Station for Art on the Underground (2018), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead (in 2018 and 2013), Screens Series, New Museum, New York (2016), Whitechapel Gallery London (2016), Schirn Frankfurt (2015–16), Performa New York (2015) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2014). In 2014 she designed the stage for the Serpentine Gallery's Extinction Marathon. She has also presented works at many major biennials and festivals including a commission for Frieze Projects at Frieze Art Fair, New York (2016), São Paulo Art Biennial (2016), the Athens Biennale (2018), and the Sharjah Biennial (2019).

Her live events, which involve music, video, objects and speech, have been presented at venues including Tate Britain, the Serpentine Gallery, Palais de Tokyo, Whitechapel Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Her works are held in a number of public collections including Tate, the Arts Council Collection and Castello di Rivoli, Turin. In October 2021, Phillipson contributed to WWF's campaign, Art For Your World.

Broadcast

Phillipson's videos have been screened on BBC Two and Channel 4 television and her audio collages and poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.

In December 2023, Phillipson appeared in several Christmas special episodes of University Challenge on BBC Two, in which she captained a team of notable alumni from Middlesex University. The team included Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey, comedian and actor Dan Renton Skinner, music journalist David Hepworth and architectural historian David Heathcote. Phillipson's team beat alumni from the University of Leeds and Bangor University in the heat and semi-finals, respectively, and went on to win against Corpus Christi College, Oxford in the season final.

Early life and education

Heather Phillipson was born in 1978 in the borough of Haringey in North London and brought up in Greenwich, South East London. The youngest of three children, her mother was a social worker and feminist activist and her father a teacher, artist, jazz musician and writer. Phillipson and her siblings were raised with an interest in the arts and music and Phillipson, while still a child, was awarded Grade 7 from the ABRSM on both violin and piano. At the age of nine, Phillipson won a London-wide poetry competition for the borough of Lewisham. As a teenager, Phillipson and her family moved to West Wales, where Phillipson attended Ysgol Dyffryn Taf comprehensive school.^[4] She later went on to study Art & Design at Pembrokeshire College in the town of Haverfordwest where she also worked part-time in a record shop, building up her collection and knowledge of UK dance and electronic music, which later informed her practice as a DJ, playing house, jungle and drum and bass. Phillipson went on to become active in the late-90s UK rave and free party scene. As Phillipson noted when interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions in 2020,^[5] this has had a significant impact on the sampling, rhythmic and tonal structures of her work.^[6]

Personal life

Phillipson lives in Hackney, East London, where her studio is also based.

Since 2016, she has volunteered as a mentor with Arts Emergency, a UK-based charity working to increase access to the arts for 16-19-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Awards and nominations

2008: Eric Gregory Award for Poetry^[7]

2009: Faber New Poets Award^[8]

2013: Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (shortlist)

2013: Michael Murphy Memorial Prize (shortlist)[1]

2014: Next Generation Poet^[9]^[10]

2016: Friends Prize for Literature, Poetry magazine, Chicago^[11]

2016: Film London Jarman Award for film and video art^[12]

2017: Selected for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square^[13]

2018: Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Short Film Award nomination from the European Film Academy^[14]
2022: Nominated for the Turner Prize^[15]

Publications

Phillipson has published five volumes of poetry:

Faber New Poets 3 (Faber and Faber, 2009)
NOT AN ESSAY (Penned in the Margins, 2012)
Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe Books, 2013)
more flinching (Periplum Press, 2018)
Whip-hot & Grippy (Bloodaxe Books, 2019)

References

^ "HEATHER PHILLIPSON". heatherphillipson.co.uk. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ Holmes, Helen (30 July 2020). "Heather Phillipson's Dystopian Sculpture Lets You Spy on Trafalgar Square". Observer. Retrieved 6 May 2023.
^ "What's Coming Next: Fourth Plinth 2020". London City Hall. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "The Woman Bridging the Divide Between Art and poetry". Retrieved 30 November 2018.
^ "BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Heather Phillipson". BBC. Retrieved 17 January 2024.
^ "Heather Phillipson: The Age of Love". Corridor8. Retrieved 30 November 2018.
^ "Authors' Awards | The Society of Authors". www.societyofauthors.org. Archived from the original on 23 April 2019. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "And the Faber New Poets are . . ". Faber & Faber Blog. 11 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "Home – Next Generation Poets 2014". Next Generation Poets 2014. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "Heather Phillipson". The Poetry Archive. Retrieved 1 January 2019.
^ "Poetry Magazine". Poetry Foundation. 28 November 2018. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "FLAMIN – The Jarman Award 2016". flamin.filmlondon.org.uk. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "What's Coming Next: Fourth Plinth 2020". London City Hall. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "Winners Ammodo Tiger Short Competition". IFFR. 28 January 2018. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
^ "Turner Prize 2022: Trafalgar Square whipped cream artist among nominees". BBC News. 12 April 2022. Retrieved 12 April 2022.