Heather Phillipson’s art presents viewers with a floating cacophony of human sensations: at a recent live performance in London, a beating heart pulses violently before me. A young woman appears on a cycling apparatus, moving, her heart rate accelerating; I hear verbiage un-spooling from the depths of the mind — or is it the Internet? It echoes and resounds throughout the auditorium at the Whitechapel Gallery, where I sit. Is this the artist’s voice that the audience hears, or is the figure before us a figment of a shared imagination from the crevices of social media? 

“I had it installed especially to catch all the clichés. Hearts are the best bins for clichés,” we hear the artist’s voice pronounce against the keys of an electric keyboard. 

I don’t quite understand what is happening. Indeed, I am not sure I quite understand Phillipson’s art much at all, but that is the main reason I like it. Phillipson’s practice eschews simple categorization, but rather explores the intersecting corners of disciplines. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Phillipson is quickly becoming celebrated as a poet (the June issue of Poetry features a portfolio of her work), and her performances draw on an array of literary and visual sources: there are video, music, props, and live and recorded speech that unfurls in poetic verse.

These constituent pieces will rarely make sense alone. Rather, they drift and float together, inviting spectators into an interior world until they are left questioning a singular, often fundamental emotion