| When we think of sculpture, we think of physical descriptors—terms like mass, weight, extension, and surface area. We envision objects that take up space and occupy three measurable dimensions. From the mammoth to the miniscule, the figural to the architectural, we all know that sculpture takes up space. But just how it goes about occupying space is something Scottish-born sound artist Susan Philipsz aims to challenge. Having studied sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland, the Glasgow native pursued her master’s degree in fine art at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Ireland. It was there that she first began thinking about ways to expand her conceptions of sculptural space, as she explains in a recent interview: “When I went to Belfast to do my MA, I started thinking about sound, working with sound… | 
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Anna Smith
Susan Philipsz, Tormin Centrefold: The Lost Reflection, 2007. Sound installation, 2.10 min, Skulptur Projekte Muenster. Courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.
When we think of sculpture, we think of physical descriptors—terms like mass, weight, extension, and surface area. We envision objects that take up space and occupy three measurable dimensions. From the mammoth to the miniscule, the figural to the architectural, we all know that sculpture takes up space. But just how it goes about occupying space is something Scottish-born sound artist Susan Philipsz aims to challenge.
Having studied sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, Scotland, the Glasgow native pursued her master’s degree in fine art at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Ireland. It was there that she first began thinking about ways to expand her conceptions of sculptural space, as she explains in a recent interview:
“When I went to Belfast to do my MA, I started thinking about sound, working with sound… I’d always liked singing… when I was a kid I used to be in the choir, and I was in a band for a little while, and so I started to think about… singing as being quite a sculptural experience, and… what happens when you project sound into a room and how it can define space… [I] start[ed] thinking about the architectural concerns of sound, and so it seemed then to be a natural progression to go from sculpture to sound and [to] start thinking about the sculptural values of sound…”
Currently living and working in Berlin, Philipsz has continued to develop this fascination with the ways sound can inhabit and define space in her numerous international projects, installations, and interventions. Her exhibitions CV is extensive with recent accomplishments including participation in Skulptur Projekte Münster (Summer 2007); Unmonumental at the New Museum of Art (Winter 2007); Here Comes Everybody, her first solo show in New York, at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (Spring 2008); the Carnegie International (Summer 2008); the Biennale of Sydney (Summer 2008); and most recently, in September 2008, the Institute of Contemporary Art, London.
Working primarily with sound, space, and sometimes film as her media, her conceptual point of departure is the exploration of personal versus collective memory as regards popular music and film. Employing sounds, folk melodies, national anthems, pop songs, and the natural imperfections of her own unaccompanied voice, she excavates the emotional and psychological properties of sound, and how it can alter the consciousness of those who hear it, often in unexpected contexts.
Her aural interventions inhabit both white cube galleries and public spaces such as supermarkets, cinemas, or pedestrian underpasses. Whether her sound works are sung live or recorded and played from speakers, the result is an experience that is simultaneously intimate and anonymous, familiar and strange. Her pared down singing style is quite arresting, and insists that listeners—no matter what the context they are in—stop for a moment and just hear. Such works engender in the listener a new kind of awareness of the time and place the sound comes from, and its relationship to the actual moment the audience is in. “Using my own voice I attempt to trigger an awareness in the listener,” she explains, “to temporarily alter their perception of themselves in a particular place and time.”
Often this ephemeral practice engenders a sense of loss. For instance, Wild As the Wind (2002) a sound installation she presented on a San Sebastian beach consists of a recording of herself singing a very intimate love song, which is played to the open sea through trumpet speakers. Similarly, loss as a kind of death is explored in Sunset Song (2003). In this case she uses two recordings of The Banks of the Ohio, an American folk song which tells the story of a man who drowns the woman he loves. Philipsz sings both the male and female verses, while the sound is powered by solar panels placed on the roof of the building where the piece is presented. As the volume is guided by the intensity of the sun, her song grows louder as the afternoon peaks and gradually fades away with the setting sun.
The Dead (2000), perhaps her strongest meditation on death, refers both to James Joyce’s 1907 story, and to the 1987 John Huston film. The piece is presented as the sound track of a completely black 35 mm film, which is punctuated by the flecks of the white light caused by imperfections of the film stock. The process of the rolling film draws an awareness to the passage of time, while Philipsz haunting song and the film’s imperfections remind us of the film stock’s gradual deterioration and more generally, of death.
In other cases she simply uses everyday sounds to evoke new emotional experiences of the space we inhabit. In The Glass Track (2005), for instance, a sound installation executed within the controlled space of the BuroFriedrich Gallery in Berlin, consists of a recording of Philipsz rubbing the rims of wine glasses, with each pitch determined by the water level in them. Using four speakers, with a different sound emanating from each one, the sounds slowly fluctuate around the space, defining the very confines of its expansion through sound.
In Stay with Me (2005) presented at Malmö Konsthall she recorded herself singing three pop songs from different eras: Watch with Me (1972) by Joe Wise, Nothing Lasts Forever (1997) by Echo and the Bunnymen, and Pyramid Song (2001) by Radiohead. We may recognize the songs, but we may not remember who sings them, or from what time period they come from. Because they are presented in minimalist white spaces, viewers are only left with the melodies, the words, their memories, and the empty space they inhabit. It is in this way that her sound works draw attention to every curve and angle of the entire architectural space they engage with.
"I am trying to bring an audience back to their environment, not the opposite,” she says. “What I am trying to do is make you aware of the place you are in while heightening your own sense of self." It is in this way, that ultimately her interventions anthropomorphize the structures they inhabit, bringing them to life like living beings who breathe, cry, and remember.
