Heather Phillipson, Art on the Underground review: Cartoonish joy for your commute, served with a side of seriousness

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Ben Luke11 June 2018

Something strange is happening across from platform three at Gloucester Road.

There, artist and poet Heather Phillipson has created surreal goings-on involving eggs. There’s a giant one, cracked by a nail, around which hangs a life jacket. Smaller eggs tumble from a shower head. A cluster of them, tethered together like balloons, burst through the metal floor. At the far end, a paintbrush creates a red drawing on another giant ovoid pierced by a drinking straw.

Across the base of this tableau — called “my name is lettie eggsyrub” — are a series of splatted eggs on a tilted metal floor, almost like a hotplate, as if they’re ready for frying. There’s also a blackened piece of toast and from it emerges a spinning whisk. Cartoon puffs emerge like farts from loudhailers and the eggs themselves. Outsize bricks appear here and there.

Dotted across this frieze are screens, often with chicken feet beneath them, on which we see the eggs incorporated into computer games, celestial space-scapes with custard tarts like UFOs, egg sarnies spinning towards the viewer, images of embryos, of hatching chicks, danger signs and radioactive hazard symbols. Occasionally, there are written eruptions: “I’m microbial”; “a gibbering omelette”; “a quivering splodge of protoplasm”.

What does all this mean? I’ll have a stab in a moment. But this is undoubtedly the most ambitious and intense installation I’ve seen at Gloucester Road, the jewel in the Art on the Underground programme. The organisation has been producing art across the Tube network for years, and Gloucester Road has always been its grandest space, but it’s also a tricky one, with a sequence of elegant and tall arches for artists to grapple with.

Phillipson almost obliterates this insistent architecture. Standing back, it felt almost like looking at a screen, with both a tumbling and buoyant animation — a digital landscape, even though it’s powerfully three-dimensional.

Phillipson trained as a musician and is also an award-winning poet and her art reflects a multidisciplinary outlook; one senses that she wants us to feel the intimacy of poetry and the immersion of music. She once told the New York Times that she hoped viewers experiencing her installations felt like they were “walking through a poem, a landscape, a body, a swimming pool, a screen, a search engine, a piece of music”.

The push and pull between sculptural physicality, the play of language and the allure and repulsion of the digital — particularly the endless depths of the online space — have helped make Phillipson one of the most in-demand artists internationally. She’s following this commission with, among other things, a project for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, a show at Baltic in Gateshead, the Sharjah Biennial, and, in 2020, the next work for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Like the Gloucester Road commission, the plinth work, called THE END, involves food: a dollop of cream with a cherry on top. It also has a sting in the tail: a fly on the cream and a drone, which will surveil Trafalgar Square.

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Phillipson has spoken of how she wants THE END to exist in a state of “exuberant unease” and that’s true, too, of my name is lettie eggsyrub. Because for all its pop-arty, cartoonish fun, this commission is faintly sinister. There are loads of jokes and puns but there’s an undertone of violence and cataclysm.

If eggs are a symbol of fertility, then look what’s happening to them here: overproduced, on computer-game conveyor belts, splatted, smashed, split with a nail. So you might be seduced by its jauntiness or made nauseous by it. But it certainly gives you plenty to ponder.

Until June 2019 (art.tfl.gov.uk)

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