Susan Philipsz has become one of Britain’s most renowned voices in the world of sound art. Born and raised in Scotland, she is now based in Berlin. Over her career, she has created 20 public collections in varying locations and was awarded an OBE in 2014 for her services to British Art.
What is her style?
Although she is originally trained in sculpture, Susan Philipsz specialises in sound installations which typically feature recordings of her own voice. Her work draws on the architectural and historical background of the spaces in which it will be displayed, often working in dialogue with them. Previous pieces have included reworkings or deconstructions of famous compositions with the final goal of exploring “the emotive and psychological effects of sound,” as she said in a YouTube conversation.
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How did Susan Philipsz train?
Susan Philipsz studied sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and later achieved her Master’s in Fine Arts from the University of Ulster. It was during her undergraduate degree that Philipsz began thinking about how sound interacts with sculpture and, by extension, how space can help define the physicality of sound.
However, Philipsz’s interest in sound can be traced further back than her academic background. In her youth, she sang in her local Catholic choir where she learnt how to harmonise. Despite her fascination with music, Philipsz never received any formal musical training; she cannot read or write sheet music and has never taken vocal lessons, but insists that this is essential in distinguishing her creative process. “If I’d gone to music school and had proper training”, she reflects, “I would not be doing what I do today.” This is because the frequent inclusion of her untrained voice in her work creates a sense of intimacy and vulnerability, evoking an innately human presence. The flaws in her voice and the instruments she uses create a product that everyone can identify with, holding a mirror to our shared fragility and promoting introspection.
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What are some of Susan Philipsz’s notable works?
Perhaps Susan Philipsz’s most famous work, Lowlands (2010), consists of different versions of the 16th-century Scottish lament ‘Lowlands Away’ sung by Philipsz herself. Echoing beneath three bridges on the River Clyde, each verse of this mournful song played at once, coming together for each chorus. It was this work that won Philipsz the Turner Prize, being the first sound installation to receive it. Originally commissioned for the Glasgow International Festival, the piece was later exhibited at the Tate Britain.
Part File Score (2014) is one of Philipsz’s many collaborations with the Hamburger Bahnhof gallery in Berlin. The piece explored the life of Hanns Eisler, a German-Austrian composer best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany. However, Philipsz’s work paid particular interest to his entanglements with the FBI after emigrating to the US due to exile from Germany by the Nazi Party. The piece consisted of a twelve-tone composition (in homage to the twelve archways of the Bahnhof) and deconstructed three of Eisler’s compositions. The disjointed nature of the piece aimed to demonstrate the displacement that Eisler experienced while creating some of his most famous work. Unlike many of her other installations, Philipsz added a visual element by superimposing Eisler’s film scores onto pictures of redacted FBI files monitoring Eisler’s movements. Part File Score was later exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2016.
Another landmark work, War Damaged Musical Instruments (2015), utilised a 14-channel sound installation to reconstruct a fractured version of ‘The Last Post’. Philipsz embarked on a process lasting years, locating instruments that were damaged from various historical wars, mainly in the UK and Germany. What she found were mostly military bugles that were used on the battlefield to signal the surrounding soldiers, ranging from the Battle of Waterloo (1815) to the First World War (1914–1918). The piece aimed to explore how time changes the types of sounds these instruments are capable of producing, with the amount of breath required to use them now becoming a metaphor for our own mortality.
Of course, these works are just a taste of the vast range of subjects Philipsz has explored in her career spanning over three decades. To learn more about some of her other installations, I would recommend visiting her profile on the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery website: https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/52-susan-philipsz/
Where can I see any of her current work?
As of July 2025, two of Susan Philipsz’s works are currently being exhibited, promising to stretch her oeuvre even further.
East By West can be found at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Tones created by conch shells taken from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts drift through the trees lining the gallery’s garden. The piece aims to evoke a wind that knows no boundaries, reflecting the gallery’s location as it once stood directly next to the Berlin Wall.
The Lower World can be found in Luxembourg’s Aquatunnel until October 18th The tunnel was originally built for waste management and civil defence, but is now home to layers of Philipsz’s eerie vocals creating an Underworld reminiscent of the sirens in Greek mythology.