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On 26 March, the day her sculpture The End was due to be installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, Heather Phillipson shared a video made by her brother. To the rousing tones of Herb Alpert's "Spanish Flea", a tea towel was raised to reveal a model of the sculpture - a teetering swirl of whipped cream topped off with an over-sized cherry, a fly and a drone - against a backdrop of hoarded loo rolls. Cheering crowds were led by cardboard cut-outs of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Dot Cotton. Above them all, Boris Johnson dangled from a string zipwire.
In the uneasy current moment, no cheering crowd, nor trumpet fanfare greeted The End when it was at last unveiled on Thursday. The quiet reveal was unintentionally apt. Phillipson's sculpture is in part a satire on hubris and excess - an unstable monument to greedy indulgence collapsing under its own weight.
Back in March I met Phillipson to chat about The End over cups of herbal tea in a noisy café in Hackney. It was to be a big year for her. There was the Fourth Plinth, of course, but also a composition for BBC radio (Phillipson is a poet and musician as well as an artist) and the prestigious annual commission to fill the central Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain, now delayed until next year.
We discussed other recent work: My Name is Lettie Eggysrub, a huge installation of tormented egg sculptures that she installed along the...