In Heather Phillipson’s highly structured and usually short moving image works, she uses synaesthetic interplays of visual, oral/aural and textual elements to form conjunctions and disjunctions. Through such combinations she explores points of exchange and play – opening up sites that are somehow in-between. These sites may be literal or metaphorical; often the videos are made in response to the visual or audible characteristics of a particular site but, through subtle manipulations of the relationship between the sound and the image, for example, they also seek to open up an ulterior site – to invoke the passage into a place that is outside of narrative or the everyday.

The idea of ‘play’ as both performance and exploration is critical in this respect and is manifest in both the particular (and peculiar) activities that the videos document, and in their provisional aesthetic. Having been classically trained on the violin and the piano from a young age, and having spent several years studying and writing poetry, the structure of the videos as compositions is also of critical importance. Each one is tightly choreographed, and utilises aspects of poetic composition such as brevity, economy and rhythm, and aspects of musical composition such as structure, harmony and counterpoint.

Through the use of ordinary settings and activities, combined with syntactic leaps of the visual, the aural and the linguistic, Phillipson responds to and constructs sites both within and without the picture frame. She sets up tensions between the everyday (locations, objects, gestures) and the structures imposed on it in the composition and editing processes that take it elsewhere. Through synaesthetic alignments and divergences (synchrony and asynchrony) the videos explore the passage between different modes of articulation and different ‘places’. They refer to the everyday and then depart for elsewhere.