This year’s Turner prize exhibition opens with Heather Phillipson’s reprise of her 2021 Tate Britain installation, Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach. Newly reconfigured for the top floor of Tate Liverpool, Phillipson’s installation benefits from the edit. A succession of blinking eyes, culled from nature documentaries, look back at us accusingly, as if the ecological crisis is all our fault, which it obviously is. The gallery walls are washed by film of brewing storms and migrating swans. Even the curlews are complaining. On a big screen the sun comes up like a peach, and the Earth, Phillipson tells us in a new audio commentary available in a forest of dangling headphones, is a flambéed tomato.
Phillipson’s audio works are a collage of voices (she has won prizes for her several volumes of poetry), driven by her deadpan, wry delivery. In the middle of her end-of-the-world slapstick installation, big propane gas cylinders are hit by clanking lumps of metal, announcing our end times in a teetering shed.
