In Conversation with Heather Phillipson: Exploring Conflict, Harmony, and a Return to Wales

Back in September, we visited Glynn Vivian in Swansea to explore Heather Phillipson’s major exhibition Out of this World, commissioned by Glynn Vivian and the Imperial War Museum. Following this, we were lucky enough to catch up with Heather and ask her about how she responded to and developed the commission’s themes, with references ranging from blimps to bats, crystal bowls to opera. Interview by Suzie Jones.

SJ Hi Heather, congratulations on this commission. I had a beautiful experience visiting and stayed for quite a few hours. Can you tell us a bit about the sources, references, and ideas that fed into this show?

HP When I was invited to make this show, a co-commission between the Imperial War Museum and Glynn Vivian, I was asked to respond to the theme of "conflict". Rather than consider conflict via overt and direct references to warfare, I was interested in everything that might surround these ideas—territories, perspectives, atmospheres. When I first started working on the show, there had been a recent Pentagon report into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena over the USA, and suspected Russian or even alien interference. However, it was concluded that the only airborne article detected was a "sadly deflating weather balloon". This image, the huge imaginative leap, and the overlap between meteorological instruments and unknown forces coming from the skies, was really my starting point—what we transmit into airspace and what we receive back: aircraft, spacecraft, chemicals that affect the climate, and, of course, hallucinations.

Thinking about Wales' key role in the development of radar, I started thinking about all this also, primarily, in relation to sound. Sound is not only an inescapable side effect of warfare, but it has also been used strategically - as a hallucinogenic force that can disrupt and disorient. At the same time, I was looking through the Imperial War Museum archives (a selection of paintings from which I have chosen to accompany my show) and was taken by the alien perspectives - encountering Earth from above, clouds and contrails, things flying, floating, and collapsing.

I also knew from the start that I wanted to bring in the work of the overlooked Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts-Hughes, whose astonishing "voice figures" (acoustic images made using her voice and an eidophone - a device she invented herself) are also included in a separate room upstairs. In the end, all of these elements came together to form what you find in the three interrelated spaces of the ground-floor galleries and garden, the mezzanine, and the two upstairs rooms—the transition through tones, heights, perspectives, light levels and, above all, sonic environments.

SJ Oh yes, the voice figures by Margaret Watts-Hughes are incredible. I hear they have never been displayed as artworks before! Did you know about her previously? Can you describe discovering her work?

HP I first came across Margaret Watts-Hughes and her works about five years ago, but I can’t remember the exact sequence of events. I know that from the first image I saw, I was exhilarated. I began trying to find out more and discovered pockets of emergent research. But the work, it seemed, was only available as reproductions, and I was burning to see them in person.

When I was developing my show for Glynn Vivian, and its sonic preoccupations were becoming ever more apparent, it occurred to me that Margaret Watts-Hughes’ unearthly voice figures - a fascinating but overlooked part of Welsh history - were the ideal partner. The team at Glynn Vivian worked with Cyfarthfa Castle, where the works have been in storage for decades, to loan them for my exhibition.

I requested to suspend the works, as it was crucial to me that, as works on glass and therefore double-sided, they be seen with light passing through them. As they appear in the show, in a single space, swaying gently, it’s almost as if the light is emitting from them and, perhaps with it, the ghostly sounds from which they are made.

SJ You think about, and I sense identify with, non-human life forms and their subjugation and fetishisation within human-made regimes and social structures. That also felt very present in this commission - I remember birds, bats, the whale, algae, and insects. Could you please talk a bit about this ongoing preoccupation in your work?

HP Art is a human construction, but the world isn’t. And my art is preoccupied with the world. Worlds. Ecosystems. Systems. Similarly, warfare is a uniquely human activity, but its consequences extend far beyond the human. It magnifies the human and shrinks it. Anything beyond the human is collateral. It obliterates whole worlds and ecosystems and forces new worlds and ecosystems. It is inherently otherworldly.

In Out of This World, conflict is conceived almost like the weather—an immersion in material and immaterial phenomena, visual disturbance, spatial and sonic derangement, an atmosphere. These are also some of the tactics of warfare, and they soak into everyone and everything inside them.

SJ The crystal singing bowls in the room between the main space and the garden gave me head tingles. Yet, you chose to place these in a way that prevented the room from becoming a meditation space. No beanbags to lie on, the mist curtain dictating navigation... I felt as if I was entering a machine of some sort. Can you speak a little about that piece?

HP I wanted that room to feel like entering a different ‘movement’ - a transposition, a shift in key. I wanted it to feel like the next phase on an extraterrestrial journey, kind of ‘planetary’, an orrery.

Crystal bowls are usually activated by human touch - via a mallet - in order to induce healing states, but here they are mechanised, absented from human activation. Instead, they play themselves, and they play to themselves, like spectres. The singing bowls also mark the exit into the ‘coda’ - the garden at the back of the gallery, into which I inserted the amplified songs of local birds: a re-emergence.

SJ What do you hope people get away of the show?

HP I never want to preempt or delimit people's relationship with my work. I only hope that they feel something.

SJ I am told that you had your first solo show at Glynn Vivian, so this is a sort of return for you. I also read that you spent your teenage years in Pembrokeshire. How did it feel to produce a show in South West Wales?

HP Magical, like Wales itself.

Heather Phillipson: Out of this World closes on 26 January 2025. Free entry.

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