I didn’t know a great deal about Cornelia Parker‘s work other than the piece featured above, and Thirty Pieces of Silver, but I thought this might be my sort of thing. It very much was. It held for me the same wow factor as the exhibition by Antony Gormley I’d seen a few years ago.
What did I like about these works? Well, ultimately I love the way the artist thinks and how she re-purposes objects. I think you need to read the information to each piece to appreciate what she is doing. I certainly did. I also like the way the suspended art pieces create shadows on the walls.
The Kiss is in the main entrance hall (where you buy tickets). She rather likes string! I like the way the string wraps around the couple, binding them further together.
Thirty pieces of Silver (a quote borrowed from the BIble) is a work that took the artist around car-boot sales, markets and auctions collecting silver plate. Even friends and family donated items. All of them were steamrollered over before being assembled into thirty separate piles and suspended a few inches above the ground. They hover, twirling slightly as air moves around them.
Cornelia takes items, breaks them, shoots them, uses remains and sets them under glass, like the sawn-off shotgun and residue in the photo below.
The Oliver Twist doll in the above photo was cut in half by the guillotine used to behead Marie Antionette (guillotine is in the Chambers of Horrors). Cornelia was also able to visit Customs & Excise UK and persuaded them to give her certain objects for her to repurpose, including the incinerated remains of some cocaine in the next photo!
I took many photos of Cold Dark Matter. It is possibly my favourite of the whole exhibition. This once garden shed was blown up using Semtex by the Army School of Ammunition. The artist pressed the plunger! The soldiers then helped her collect the pieces from the field. In one of the Art History classes I attended, we touched on pyrotechnic art, and I became rather fascinated with it. Although the artists we looked at used their explosions to destroy their art as part of the art, I much prefer Cornelia Parker’s idea of using the pieces afterwards. The shadow effect created in these displays fascinated me (I love photographing shadows).
As soon as I saw these framed items, I thought Turin Shroud. I read everything I could find about the Turin Shroud when I was younger. Indeed, I was right about this. The artist used paper and a hot poker (I think it was) to create the burn marks that are like the Turin Shroud, which was rescued from a fire, leaving similar marks on folds of the cloth.
The artist worked in Bunhill Fields in London and took casts from the path where William Blake is buried for the above artwork.
In Island, the glass is painted with white brushstrokes of cliff chalk. The artist says ‘(The structure)… becomes enclosed, inward looking, a vulnerable domain, a little England with a cliff-face veil.’ The greenhouse sits on worn encaustic tiles from the Houses of Parliament.
I should say that in War Room every empty mould represents a life lost, but not everyone. It really makes you think.
The artist printed off the Wikipedia page and then asked people to embroider the work! Wow!
As well as the installations and framed items, there are two video rooms. One of the films, War Machine shows Remembrance Day poppies being machine made. I wondered if this was in the Poppy Factory in Richmond, which I went to many years ago with a group from church, but it was a different factory. However, we did see poppies being made this way, as well as ex-veterans making them by hand. We also had the opportunity of making one of our own (which I still have), and to write on a wooden cross the name of a someone serving in the war who didn’t come back. I was able to do that for my uncle and his cross was later set out with others in Parliament Square.
The exhibition is on until 16th October. I hope I have inspired you to see it for yourself.
My London+ 