Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Relative Fields in a Garden, 2018. Acrylic paint, ceramic, bamboo, birch veneer, mirror film, metal chairs, Serge analog synthesizer, sound transducers, light sensors and multichannel looping audio players. Courtesy of the artists.
Liz Phillips
In our family we are all working on our art and working around each other all the time. Last summer, we went on vacation to Cape Cod. Heidi painted at the pond while I was recording and listening underwater and on its surface. The quiet soundscape of the Cape contrasted with my previous recordings for Wave Crossings, a project at Governors Island that tracks the movement of sound in New York Harbor. My mother had died a few months before at age ninety-two. In her memory, Heidi suggested using our home—my plants and garden, my mother's patio chairs, and her own paintings as the basis of another show.

Several years ago, I had used houseplants to radiate capacitance fields in an installation. So we began with this garden image: me, an avid gardener, constantly organizing plants to stage colorful events to occur naturally throughout the year. The composition of the garden and the recording of sound have become obsessions of mine. Recording the shifts in the sonic landscape is a way to compose my life, art and environment. Each day, I capture a song from the space. During this process I have acquired new knowledge of the birds in our area, singing along with the trains, traffic, planes, and children playing. This piece is an opportunity to celebrate and build on the memory of my mother's long life and our local land and soundscape.
My practice is about the invisible: the audible, the spatial, scale, orbits, location, waves, trajectories and their relationships. Relative Fields in a Garden voices a place that I have shaped (by gardening and recording and processing). I treat found sound as material that resonates a narrative of time, a year in this site-specific location. For many years my practice has addressed ideas of the imprint of the body on an environment. This work engages the viewer in an immersive environment—this one blends family, urban garden, and seasons in Queens.

Certain sound events will be associated with specific physical events. In this way, through both sound and physical activity, an installation is composed and realized, to myself, and again differently to each audience member in his or her own time and scale. These installations cannot be seen in a single moment. It takes time to experience their facets. One needs to hear and repeat many events to experience their gradations and intersections. Sound images result from their adjacent and simultaneous relationships.
The word "volumes" immediately recalls the old encyclopedias on our family shelves now in the garbage dumps because information storage has changed so dramatically in my lifetime. "Volumes" also conveys the mathematical formula for determining the area of a container. This piece springs the volumes from the shelves and frees them from their containers into open space, with overlapping fields releasing energy that balances between events.

As an artist who uses sound as a primary material, volume often refers to loudness. In this work, where sounds emanate from objects that become loud speakers, each sound is voiced at a set level. The sounds speak like people and natural physical objects (bamboo, porcelain, chairs, wood), and the dynamic range is set by the object's resonances.

Our collaboration at the Queens Museum (in this exhibition named Volumes) gives us a challenging and active place and duration for the audience to experience our installation. It is a great opportunity for Heidi and me to work at this scale indoors and together. Heidi's multi-dimensional painting, the wall and the pathway along that wall gives me an exciting resonant landscape to work with. Real time changes in light throughout each day (and the year) will modulate and resonate this sonic and visual experience. I look forward to experiencing and also being surprised by the coming together of Relative Fields in a Garden in the Queens Museum.
Liz Phillips (b. 1951, Jersey City, NJ) received her BA from Bennington College in 1973. She has made interactive sound installations for Harvestworks on Governors Island, NY (2017); Roulette, Brooklyn, NY (2012); Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, NY (2010); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2009, 2008); Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, NY (2004, 2003); Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2004, 1992); Lincoln Center, New York, NY (2002, 2001); the Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2002); Creative Time, New York, NY (2001, 1981); The Kitchen, New York, NY (1999, 1975, 1972); The World Financial Center, New York, NY (1992, 1988); Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (1991, 1988); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1988, 1985); the Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, SC (1987); The Clocktower, New York, NY (1986); Merce Cunningham Company, New York, NY (1985); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1981); Jacob’s Pillow, Lee, Massachusetts (1985); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (1984, 1982); Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin, Germany (1980); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1978); Rene Block Gallery, Berlin, Germany (1978); Artist’s Space, New York, NY (1974); and Art Park (1974); among others. Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987); NYSCA Individual Media Commissions (2015, 2007, 2004, 2000, 1988, 1986, 1984); NEA New Genres commissions (1985, 1983); NEA Interarts (1987, 1984); CAPS Fellowship (1982, 1977); and received NEA Composer’s commissions in (1981,1976). Since 1982, Phillips has lived and worked in Sunnyside, Queens.
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