joseph scissorhands: Cornelia Parker

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (detail)

"My work is coonsistently unstable, in flux: leant against a wall, hovering, or so fragile it might collapse. Perhaps that is what I feel, about my own relationship to the world." - Cornelia Parker.

I approached this exhibition with an air of curiosity, as I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I was aware of course of those headline grabbing pieces of Parker's in which, in the name of art she had blown up a garden shed and its contents then suspended them mid-explosion, (I actually thought the Semtex explosive would have done much more serious damage to the contents of the shed, many items appeared relatively unscathed), and steam-rollered items of silverware, then suspended them inches above the floor, leaving them to resemble exquisite, glistening puddles of silver. There was though, as this show proved many aspects of Parker's ouevre that I was unfamiliar with, and this exhibition proved to be most enlightening. Parker's work is particularly strong on concept and based in ideas. What she essentially does is destroy/transform objects, seeing beauty in destruction, creating something extraordinary and new in the transformative process and presenting the results as art. Parker herself states - "I seem to like killing things off and then resurrecting them... I think of it as transubstantiation. " Though the results of this process can appear a little cold at times, there is enough of the artists' touch to make you feel a connection with the work. Parker's vision interests me as she can take something humdrum or ordinary and create an extraordinary idea and artwork from it through her acts of intervention. Much of the work appeared to be based around or reliant on the concept of light, creating compositions with objects that cast beautiful, strange shadows to create dramatically immersive installations such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View and Island (seen below). Another aspect of Parker's work that struck me here was the sheer diversity of unconventional materials and media that she works with - leftover silver filings from an engraver, bullets, a mile of string, snake venom and anti-venom, red hot pokers and paper, and melted celluloid from pornographic films, as well as the blood red perforated crêpe paper negative sheets from a factory making remembrance day commemorative poppies lining the walls of War Room. War Room is a particularly poignant installation serving as a memorial of war, and is much more powerful in its purpose than the endless, pompous, macho, state-commissioned bronze statues of generals on horse-back parading around more or less every major capital city across the world. The blood red walls formed by the poppy sheets represent the actual blood spilled on the battlefields of war, and the negative spaces of the poppies perhaps symbolise the many lives needlessly cut short in battle. Not all is doom and gloom however, as Parker's sense of humour is present throughout the exhibition not least at the entrance to Tate Britain where she employs a Duchampian sense of mischief with her playful intervention - The Distance, The Kiss with String, in which she wraps Rodin's The Kiss in a mile of string.