An art school reject who once sang over the public address system at a branch of Tesco has won this year's Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, 44, was awarded the £25,000 ($53,000) prize at London's Tate Britain. The artist won for Lowlands, a series of recordings of a Scottish lament
played beneath three River Clyde bridges, and Long Gone, based on the Syd Barrett song of the same name. Her previous work includes 1998's Filter, in which she sang songs by Radiohead and Nirvana in a crowded bus station and a Tesco supermarket to unsuspecting customers.
The jury, which included Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis and novelist Philip Hensher, said it "admired the way in which her work provokes both intellectual and instinctive responses".
The panel "applauded the imaginative worlds of all the artists".
Philipsz is the first sound artist to be nominated for the prize.
She was born in 1965 in Maryhill, Glasgow, where as a child she joined the local Catholic church with her two sisters. "I just thought it was so magical when all those voices would rise up and come together," she said in an interview last month.
At 23, she was rejected by Glasgow School of Art and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and then the University of Ulster in Belfast, where she met her future husband, photographer Eoghan McTigue. They live in Berlin.
"I hate my voice," she said. "I particularly hate my speaking voice: I think I mumble a lot."
Critics are more positive. "Having heard Philipsz's Lowlands in situ and in Glasgow, I can say that the soundwork's mournful power is surprisingly undiminished by its trip south," wrote the Independent's Charles Darwent in his October review. "Under a Clyde bridge, the piece - the artist singing a 16th-century lament, a cappella, on a three-part loop - seemed to raise specific Scottish ghosts."
In May, Curtis said this year's shortlist "is not about emerging talent, it's about people who've proved themselves". All of this year's nominees are artists in their 40s.
- Independent
