“You make an open- ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope and artwork to be- a constantly living thing.”
Cornelia Parker
Cornelia Parker is one of Britain’s best loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists. Using transformation, playfulness and storytelling, she engages with important issues of our time, be it violence, ecology or human rights.
Thirty Pieces of Silver
The show opens with the radiant Thirty Pieces of Silver hanging spotlit in darkness. The pieces include plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. Every piece was crushed by a steamroller and arranged into groups, which were suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. I found this installation very fascinating, especially because of her perspective of seeing crushed objects as transformation and not destruction. It was her first large scale project feature which she described as ‘cartoon death’ as she has long been fascinated by the violence of cartoons like flattening Tom, Jerry filled with bullet holes and Road Runner falling off a cliff.
Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view
This installation is one of her most iconic works. It connections between the world of science, space and the everyday. She collected and suspended the blackened, twisted objects from transparent wires in the Tate Gallery. These were lit with a single light bulb that hung in the centre of the installation. The apparently floating debris might have been the result of the Big Bang, a terrorist attack or be a 3D model demonstrating chaos theory. The dramatic shadows on the walls added drama on the walls which made it very interesting to look at. Walking around the sculpture made me feel something unexplainable, like I could understand what was on her mind while she put it together.