Biography

Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, large-scale installation, drawing, music, text and online media. Through collisions of image, noise, objects, words and digital insertions, her works stake out an ambiguous territory in which cultural references and emotional responses are mutually contingent and reactive.

Phillipson’s work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including The Age of Love, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2018); my name is lettie eggsyrub, Gloucester Road tube station, Art on the Underground, London (2018); ENDING ALL PARTIES / EXCEPT THE PARTY / WHERE U MEET YOUR OWN BRAIN, Drawing Room, London (2017); Screens Series, New Museum, New York (2016); more flinching, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016) and EAT HERE, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2015). Among her group exhibitions and screenings are an online commission for I Was Raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018) and presentations at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2018); Frieze Projects New York (2016); 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) and 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Her work can be found in the collections of the Tate, London; Grundy Gallery / Contemporary Arts Society, Blackpool, UK and the Arts Council Collection, London, among others.

Phillipson has been selected as the next artist to make a sculpture for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London (2020). She received the Tiger Ammodo Best Short Film Award from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018) and the Film London Jarman Award (2016). Also an acclaimed poet, she was awarded the Friends of Literature Poetry Prize from Poetry magazine, Chicago (2016) and named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society, UK (2014). She has published four volumes of poetry, and her next full-length collection will be published in March 2019.

She was born in 1978 in London, where she continues to live and work.

SAF participation:
Sharjah Biennial 14

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Phillipson, Heather

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Heather Phillipson’s work often appears as associational clusters, organised spatially, that combine single- and multi-screen videos, mass-produced objects, web images, audio loops, written and oral texts, and physical and digital graphics.