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Heather Phillipson Tate Britain Commission review - well, this is bonkers. I love it

 (Tate)
(Tate)

Readers who have pigeon-dodged their way across Trafalgar Square during the last year will know the work of Heather Phillipson, the latest artist to be commissioned to fill Tate Britain’s imposing Duveen Galleries. The End, her Fourth Plinth sculpture, is a monumental splodge of whipped cream, topped by a cherry and fed on by a fly the size of a small horse, which is joined in its feasting by a massive drone, constantly scanning the square with its camera.

I didn’t love that piece - I felt the drone looked incongruous without its primary purpose being obvious (go to theend.today to see the live feed, still depressingly empty of people) - but I like this one, very much. Rupture No.1: blowtorching the bitten peach is a complete environment, with the three distinct areas of the galleries delineated by discrete lighting, and soundscapes that can only be described as ‘rainforesty’, ‘watery’ and ‘arctic-y’.

Phillipson’s The End is on the Fourth PlinthPA
Phillipson’s The End is on the Fourth PlinthPA

Phillipson reimagines the Duveens as a sequence of “charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms”. Essentially, with one step, you enter a bizarre universe where materials and objects from salt and sand to roof vents, dipsticks, fuel tanks and a collapsed silo are repurposed, remixed and redeployed to create strangely familiar yet utterly strange sculptures with a whiff of the organic about them, though there’s nothing organic here at all.

As you enter the first, red-lit room, you’re greeted by a salt garden sprouting LED screens with glitchy close-ups of animal eyes (the first, belonging to some kind of reptile, periodically gets licked by a glossy pink tongue, which is pretty disgusting). Speakers hang from the ceiling on long ropes that trail like parasitic vines; glowing lumps of quartz dangle in rope bags, looking unsettlingly as if something might be gestating inside them.

You walk through the legs of a vast, slightly reproachful-looking monster with a hide of newspaper (the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Metro all make an appearance) to find four horned, fuel-tank creatures squatting on car-tyre haunches and lapping at the contents of a large paddling pool, bathed in purplish light.

Each room is defined by a discrete lighting scheme
Each room is defined by a discrete lighting scheme

The third space, blue and windswept (in sound anyway) features a mildly horrifying film of caterpillars squirming all over each other and a disconcerting wind chime arrangement of gas cannisters marked ‘highly flammable’. Right at the back, a projection of a sun-like peach hovers over a glitchy sea. This is as good an indication as any that this isn’t all meant to be chin-strokey. Nobody doesn’t understand that peaches are ridiculous, least of all Phillipson. She’s enjoying herself.

Anyone who has visited more than one Turbine Hall installation will appreciate how difficult it is for an artist to tackle a large, empty space. Even the Duveens, which constitute a smaller square footage, can be tricky to fill. Phillipson does so effortlessly, each element fitting perfectly and making sense, even if none of it makes sense at all. Her work doesn’t hammer home messages (though she is vegan and has spoken before about her concern for the way that humans treat non-human animals, and there’s a definite environmental-collapse riff going on here), it simply layers ideas over images over ideas, glues them together with weird humour and dusts them with a sprinkling of threat. There’s a lot to look at, and a lot to think about - and a lot to simply enjoy.

From May 17 to January 23

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