arts and design

Heather Phillipson brings her ‘parallel planet’ to Tate Britain

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People may well be unsettled by the strange, apocalyptic disaster zone created in Tate Britain’s grand central galleries and so be it, the artist Heather Phillipson said. “That’s fine. I’m not inviting people in to be comfortable.”

Visitors to the reopened gallery on Monday will encounter a sensory experience of noise, colour, animal eyes staring at them from screens, post-industrial mutant creatures, a 14-metre papier-mache ram-type creature and much, much more.

Phillipson is the latest contemporary artist to be tasked with the annual Tate Britain commission, filling the vast, echoing neo-classical Duveen sculpture galleries in any way they see fit.

Previous installations have included real people running back and forward, a recreation of Brian Haw’s parliament square protest camp and a huge French rotary vegetable shredder.

Tate Britain said Phillipson’s installation was one “of the most transformative commissions to date”.

A general view of what Phillipson calls a pre-posthistoric environment’.
A general view of what Phillipson calls a pre-posthistoric environment’. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Titled Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach, Phillipson has created a parallel world full of strangeness and danger, one she calls a “pre-posthistoric environment”.

One room has four diesel bowsers with papier-mache horns, apparently drinking water like animals around a pond. Elsewhere, there are gas canisters that clang like a wind chime and insects created from roof vents and car dipsticks.

Phillipson said she wanted to create a space that “felt alive” that was “hot, throbbing, pulsating … It is a space where the human becomes the alien within it.”

She said she had no agenda or topic she was addressing. “The entirety of my practice is founded on complexity. I never try to pre-empt what visitors are going to think about. In many ways I’m always aiming for incoherence.”

Phillipson is having something of a moment in that her work is also on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – a huge dollop of melting cream with a cherry and fly on top.

Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, said he was delighted the gallery would reopen with the work. “Through her unique layering of images, textures and sounds she is offering visitors an unforgettable experience.

A gallery technician poses next to the installation.
A gallery technician poses next to the installation. Photograph: John Phillips/Getty Images

“The parallel planet she has created encourages us to consider our own and how we can work individually and collectively to look at it afresh.”

It is the largest single work Phillipson has ever made and took her more than a year to complete. It was due to open last June but was delayed by the pandemic.

How visitors react remains to be seen. They might be unsettled, bemused or even emerge optimistic because of the final image in the installation. Phillipson said it was not in her power to influence the emotions of people walking through the space.

“There’s not a direct experience I’m requiring of people,” she said. “But discomfort is totally legitimate.”

Heather Phillipson: Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach, is at Tate Britain 17 May-23 January

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