Most people who walk into a Susan Philipsz installation see almost nothing. There might be a speaker fixed to a wall, or a few of them strung along a railway platform.
Then a voice starts singing, and the place you are standing in begins to feel different. The street, bridge or gallery is the same, but you are suddenly listening to it.
That shift is the heart of her work. Philipsz, a Scottish artist born in 1965, trained as a sculptor, and her sound pieces still behave like sculpture: they occupy space, belong to specific sites and change how you move through them.
She won the Turner Prize in 2010 and is now one of the best-known names in contemporary sound art. Here is how her practice developed, the works that defined it, and what it offers anyone interested in sound and art as a field of research.
From the sculpture studio to sound
Philipsz grew up in Maryhill, in Glasgow, one of six children. As a girl she sang in the local Catholic church choir with her sisters, which is where she learned to harmonise.
She studied sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee from 1989 to 1993, then took an MFA at the University of Ulster. For several years she directed Catalyst Arts, an artist-run space in Belfast.
In 2000 and 2001 she was a studio resident at MoMA PS1 in New York. She now lives and works in Berlin.
Her early pieces already used her own voice. Filter (1998) placed her versions of songs by Nirvana, Radiohead, Marianne Faithfull and The Velvet Underground in everyday settings, including a bus station and a Tesco supermarket.
Shoppers heard a quiet, unaccompanied voice drifting over the public address system, singing something half familiar. That meeting of a public loudspeaker and a private feeling runs through almost everything she has made since.
Why an untrained voice matters
Philipsz is not a trained singer, and she cannot read or write sheet music. In her work, that turns out to be a strength rather than a gap.
She has said that an unaccompanied, untrained voice can trigger powerful memories and associations, even when the listener does not know the song. A polished performance invites admiration; her plain voice invites recognition.
The songs she chooses carry their own history. The Internationale (1999) is a solo version of the revolutionary anthem. In The Dead (2000) she sings The Lass of Aughrim, the ballad at the emotional centre of James Joyce's story of the same name.
Sunset Song (2003) shows how carefully she builds a piece. She sings both the male and the female parts of the American ballad Banks of the Ohio, and the volume rises and falls with the light levels around the installation.
Lowlands: a lament under three Glasgow bridges
The work that changed her career was made for Glasgow International in 2010. Lowlands placed three recordings of her singing Lowlands Away under three bridges on the River Clyde: George V Bridge, the Caledonian Railway Bridge and Glasgow Bridge.
Philipsz described the song as a sixteenth-century Scottish lament, though its earliest documented versions are as a sailors' shanty from the 1860s. Either way, its subject is unmistakable: a lover who appears in a dream after drowning at sea.
Under the bridges, her voice mixed with traffic, wind and moving water. Passers-by could hear it well before they could work out where it was coming from.
The piece was then shown at Tate Britain and won the 2010 Turner Prize, worth £25,000. The ceremony itself was interrupted by protests against cuts to education funding.
In 2014 she was appointed OBE for services to British art. That same year she installed The Distant Sound in Ystad, Sweden, with loudspeakers on the breakwater at the harbour entrance, the setting shown at the top of this page.
Surround Me and the quiet of the City of London
Running alongside the Turner Prize exhibition was Surround Me, an Artangel commission that could be heard only on Saturdays and Sundays, from October 2010 to January 2011.
Philipsz had noticed that the City of London, home to more than 350,000 workers during the week, turns empty and silent at weekends. She answered that silence with a song cycle of six sound works arranged in a loose circle around the Bank of England.
Each location had its own song. John Dowland's Flow My Tears carried out from under London Bridge across the Thames, while The Silver Swan played in Tokenhouse Yard behind the Bank.
To hear the whole cycle you had to walk from site to site, so the quiet streets between the songs became part of the work. It is a clear case of artistic sound used to reveal a place rather than decorate it.
Study for Strings: music with the players missing
For dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, Philipsz made a piece that the documenta archive now counts among the exhibition's most impressive moments. Study for Strings was installed at the end of a platform at Kassel Hauptbahnhof, the city's old main station.
Its source is Study for String Orchestra, written in 1943 by the Czech composer Pavel Haas while he was imprisoned at Theresienstadt. It was performed by a camp orchestra for a Nazi propaganda film, after which Haas and most of the musicians were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
Philipsz recorded only the viola and cello parts and gave each pitch its own speaker in a 24-channel installation. The rest of the orchestra is simply not there.
Those gaps are the point. The silences stand for the people who are missing, and the setting, a German railway platform, makes the history impossible to set aside.
War Damaged Musical Instruments
In 2015 she turned from her voice to instruments. War Damaged Musical Instruments, commissioned by 14-18 NOW for the First World War centenary, filled the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain from November 2015 to April 2016.
It used fourteen recordings of British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in conflicts over the past two hundred years. Among them were the Balaclava Bugle and a horn from the Battle of Waterloo.
Each instrument played tones from The Last Post, the bugle call that told lost and wounded soldiers it was safe to return. Dented metal bent the notes so far that the tune became almost unrecognisable.
Part of the Tate Britain site had served as a military hospital during the First World War, which gave the work another layer of meaning. Tate later acquired it for its collection.
Where she sits among contemporary sound artists
Philipsz belongs to a generation of contemporary sound artists who moved sound out of the concert hall and into galleries and public space. In 2013 she was included in Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the first major exhibition of sound art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Other famous sound artists took related routes. Max Neuhaus hid a continuous drone beneath a subway grating in Times Square in 1977, and Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet (2001) gives each voice of a Thomas Tallis choral work its own speaker.
What sets Philipsz apart is how personal her material is. Her own voice, old songs and archival scores give her installations a human closeness that more abstract work does not always reach.
Universities and art academies have started to treat this kind of listening practice as research in its own right, a shift we trace in our piece on sound art as artistic research in Nordic institutions.
Artists who build sound into physical objects take a different path again, which we explore in our guide to sounding sculpture.
What artists and researchers can learn from her method
For anyone working in practice-based research, her installations are useful models. They show how a handful of precise choices can carry a great deal of meaning.
Start with the site. Each of her works begins with a place and its past, whether a river bridge, a station platform or a gallery that was once a hospital ward.
Work with what is missing. Silence, removed instruments and empty weekend streets do as much as the sound itself.
Treat the archive as material. Old songs and scores arrive with memories attached, and they can do their work without every reference being explained.
Keep the means simple. A few speakers and an unaccompanied voice are enough, as long as the decisions about where and when they sound are exact.
These ideas carry over into drawing, writing and documentation as well. Our article on sound drawings looks at how artists record listening on paper, a useful companion to her way of working.
Experiencing her work today
Many of her installations were temporary, so recordings, photographs and exhibition guides are how most people now encounter them. Tate's pages on War Damaged Musical Instruments and Artangel's archive for Surround Me are good places to start.
If one of her pieces is installed near you, give it time. Stand still, let the voice find you, and notice how the place around you changes while it sings.
Cover photo: loudspeakers for The Distant Sound in Ystad, 2014. Photo by Jonn Leffmann, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.