100% OTHER FIBRES, Heather Phillipson
Frieze New York starts tomorrow and alongside the art fair extravaganza there’s also Frieze Projects, which invite emerging artists to bring price tagless life to the site. Curated by Cecilia Alemani and taking place both inside the fair and around Randall’s Island Park, 2016’s projects include London-based artist Heather Phillipson and her multi-sensory objects. We spoke to the artist about reimagining the serpentine shape of the fair structure as a giant spinal chord, and how Gavin the police dog with post traumatic stress disorder influenced her work.
What interests you in using the serpentine shape of the fair?
The Frieze tent’s semi-S shape struck me immediately as being like a huge, walk-in spinal cord, blown down on Randall’s Island. It has an entrance at one end and an exit at the other – like passing through a digestive system. It also has these elongated, fabric ‘fingers’, as they’re known, that stretch out from the tent onto the surrounding lawns. Long, licky things. So, for me, it’s replete with bodily references.
The spine is also fitting because, alongside the story of Gavin the police dog’s PTSD, I was also reading – almost daily, at the time of thinking about my project – about the terror raids in Paris. There was a very perfunctorily reported story – of a spine being blasted out of a window and landing on a police car. I couldn’t help but overlay this image onto the Frieze tent, which, in aerial shots, looks like it’s been blown down onto the island. That image, and the flippancy of its reporting, came to haunt me.
So, likewise, my work reappears throughout the fair. It’s episodic – sequential – the dogs and body-parts keep coming back in different forms. The linear progression of the tent facilitates this – the forward movement, the possibility of punctuating – and puncturing – it. And there is something – not even metaphorical – about viewing the passage through the Frieze tent as a bodily conduit – it really is a site of clashing nervous systems, impulses, threat. Pleasure too, of course – but that’s what makes the experience complex, and what my work tries, simultaneously, to hold in (precarious) balance.
100% OTHER FIBRES, Heather Phillipson
100% OTHER FIBRES, Heather Phillipson
How does working in New York compare with working in east London?
Actually, a lot of the thinking and making for this project has happened in my studio in east London. This is useful for me – to be distant from the place in which I am, ultimately, working, but to hold an image of it in my mind – to get as messy as possible with it in the virtual realm. It emboldens me to hit it harder, in readiness for the physical encounter, which is always a lot leakier, harder to frame.
That said, I’m familiar with New York, and this is equally important, for different reasons. For one thing, my experience of the role of dogs in New York – their diversity and ubiquity – that’s been informative.
Then there’s the work that happens on site – I’ve been working, long-distance, with the Frieze team, to begin to realise the project ready for my arrival, so the “real’ stuff” – all the unpredictable, ungraspable bits – will really happen when we get inside the tent.
What’s next for you after Frieze?
Imminently, I’m preparing for an exhibition of a commission for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th Anniversary – another sprawling, multi-part video and sculptural work that’s going to be shown at Plymouth Arts Centre in the UK in June. After that – or, more accurately, simultaneously – I’m preparing for the 32nd São Paulo Biennale, in Brazil, in September.
Heather Phillipson’s “100% Other Fibres” is at Frieze New York until 8 May 2016