Whip-hot & Grippy

As an artist Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, drawing, music, text and live events. Significant solo shows include those at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Art on the Underground’s flagship site at Gloucester Road station in 2018. She was Artist in Residence at the Drawing Room London in 2017 and received the Film London Jarman Award 2016. Interest likely from art gallery bookshops including those where she has shown her work (e.g. Tate Modern, Tate Britain, ICA, Serpentine, Whitechapel, BALTIC, and others).

Whip-hot & Grippy is Heather Phillipson's second collection, following her highly praised debut, Instant-flex 718, published in 2013. As well as being an award-winning poet, she is an internally renowned artist whose sculpture, ‘The End’, was installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in 2020.Whip-hot & Grippy is a collection of possibilities in a state of emergency. In the first part, a series of long-form and sequenced poems augment various states of being divided/plural in attempts to activate unauthorised directions. Disrupted tangents are punctuated by recurring muzak, advertising-speak, sex scenes, terrorism, broadcast media, consumption-anxiety, protest, human-animal relations and cosmic departures. Throughout, informed discontent and humour act as drivers of dissent, mining conceptual complexity and testing poetry’s combustible potential. The book culminates in ‘more flinching’, a multi-part poem first published and freely distributed in an exhibition. Merging the news of a military dog, shot in service, with the death of a pet dog, it collapses images with bodies and politics with intimacies, enacting failed attempts to navigate practical and emotional entanglements. Whip-Hot & Grippy is Heather Phillipson's second collection, following her highly praised debut, Instant-flex 718, published in 2013. As well as being an award-winning poet, she is an internally renowned artist whose sculpture, ‘The End’, was installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in 2020.