The written and spoken word has been used recently by an increasing number of artists, but few of them work in language quite so skilfully as Heather Phillipson.
Based in London, she was one of Faber's New Poets in 2009 and has a PhD in fine art, so it might seem a chicken-and-egg proposition. But if she was by training an artist first, one suspects the two facets have always existed in tandem. For Phillipson, it is at heart all about the words.
This show at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) is Phillipson's first in Scotland, bar a one-night performance event at Glasgow's CCA as part of Glasgow International earlier this year. It comes hot on the heels of her well-received solo show at BALTIC in Gateshead in 2013, which led one critic to state: "Phillipson got into my head and just won't leave."
"We're thrilled with the show," says DCA curator Graham Domke of an exhibition that is the artist's largest to date, and also one of the biggest to be held at DCA. "It's a big commission for us and a very ambitious undertaking."
Phillipson's artistic language takes diverse forms, from sculpture to installation, video to audio. For the artist it is about "the rhythm between the bits", as she said in an interview last year. It is about "a kind of syntax of sounds, images, colours — using them like parts of speech." It is not that either words or images have greater importance: "Their relative status is confused."
Born in 1978 and brought up in London, Phillipson studied at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (2001) and completed a PhD at Central St Martins in London (2004) and Middlesex University (2008).
She has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Tate Britain, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), among others. Her interest in language led her to undertake a creative writing course at Birkbeck in London, something which helped her emerge as an award-winning poet.
Phillipson's work frequently puts viewers into odd situations in which to view her art. Recent shows have involved putting gallery visitors into a speedboat, an inflatable birthing pool or a car to view projections.
For DCA she has created "islands" from which to view her landscape of natural world installations and animal cut-outs. Commissioned to run alongside the Discovery Film Festival, Scotland's international film festival for young people (though Phillipson's show is not suitable for young children), the exhibition is the latest in a line of commissions that have included Torsten Lauschmann.
Washed with day-glo green paint and filled with multiple projections, the DCA gallery space, says Domke, has become immersive. The artist's voice navigates the visitor through the gallery to both comedic and thought-provoking effect. This is a show, on the face of it, about man's relationship with nature, "about the natural and animal world and how humans should be part of it, and yet aren't part of it," says Domke. In Phillipson's work, nature and the animals, disconcertingly, return our gaze.
Phillipson's films, set up within a landscape splash of bold cut-outs, expand the video beyond the screens. Some of the film for the "talking pictures" was shot in Dundee, from fishing lochs to the botanic gardens. "All are nature, but they are constructed nature, which is what makes it beautiful," says Domke.
There is a room of purgatory or hell at the end, replete with bagpipes and the sound of a fly buzzing around. The whole abounds with Phillipson's multiple literary and cultural references, as well as a complex and layered series of analogies.
"It's rich and poetic," says Domke, simply. "We've loved getting an artist as striking as Heather doing this."
Heather Phillipson: sub-fusc love-feast, Dundee Contemporary Arts (01382 909900, www.dca.org.uk) until November 9
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