Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson’s audacious and wide-ranging practice spans video, sculpture, installation, music composition, poetry and digital media. Her work often involves collisions of wildly different imagery, materials, and media. Through multiple, associative combinations, she conjures absurd and complex systems. She describes her works as ‘quantum thought experiments’. They often carry an underlying sense of threat – a suggestion that, in the artist’s words, ‘received ideas, images and the systems that underpin them may be on the verge of collapse.’

Born in London, UK, in 1978, Phillipson has exhibited widely, with solo projects at major national and international galleries including the annual Duveen Gallery Commission at Tate Britain, London in 2021; the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square in 2020 and a major commission for Art on the Underground at Gloucester Road Underground Station in 2018. Other notable shows have been held at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2018); Drawing Room, London (2018);  Frieze Projects, New York (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015), and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2014). Her works are held in public collections including Tate, Arts Council Collection and Castello di Rivoli, Italy.

She received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and was awarded the European Film Festival selection at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018. In 2022 Phillipson was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Phillipson is also an award-winning poet and has published three volumes of poetry.