TRACES: Cornelia Parker

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Cornelia Parker (14/7/1956- ). She is well known for her large scale, often site specific, installations. Her engagement with the fragility of existence and the transformation of matter is exemplified in two key works “Dark Matter” a cartoon-like reconstruction of an exploded army shed, and “Heart of Darkness” the formal arrangement of charred remains from a forest fire. There is an apocalyptic tone to much of her work but she also demonstrates a concern with the more insidious effects of global warming and consumerism. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire, England, in 1956. She spent a lot of time helping her father, doing physical work on the land, and saw escape and play as something rare and secretive. In Parker’s early teens, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was hospitalised periodically for electric shock treatment. She likens her practice to therapy as well as to the play she craved as a child. Parker studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974-75) followed by Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975-78), having been overlooked by the big London colleges. Later she earned her MFA at Reading University (1980-82) before settling in East London. She found it liberating to work at home, alone; the idea of a large studio with a group of assistants has never appealed to her. Parker’s home life fed into her work, for example she credits the demolition of her neighbour’s house for inspiring her major work “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” (1991). She writes “The sense of temporariness must have influenced the blowing up of the shed”. In this period, Parker began to work using found objects, which she came across as part of her job as a market salesperson. Parker came to fame in 1995 with collaborative piece “The Maybe” at the Serpentine Gallery, London – where she built a glass case inside the gallery in which performer and friend Tilda Swinton lay asleep in for eight hours each day. However, her success as she sees it did not arrive until two years later. In 1997 she met her husband, the artist Jeff McMillan, who helped her to collect pieces of wood for “Mass (Colder Darker Matter)” (1997). In the same year, she was signed by Frith Gallery in London and was nominated for the Turner Prize along with three other female artists. By the time of her nomination Parker was 40, and has spoken of the independence that her initial lack of gallery representation and distance from the commercial art market afforded her. This was in contrast to the experience of the slightly younger Young British Artists (for example Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) who rose to fame around this time. Nevertheless, Parker has always known the value of her own work. Having refused offers from private collectors, “Thirty Pieces of Silver” and “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” were bought by Tate in 1995. At 45, Parker became a mother to daughter Lily, and allowed this to feed into her work. Continuing to work with “Avoided Objects”, her work “Black Path” (2013) developed from a game the two played as they walked through East London, avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement. Other recent works on this theme include “Unsettled” (2012), based around broken furniture and “Prison Wall Abstracts: A Man Escaped” (2012-13), inspired by cracked walls. In recent years, Parker has also worked as a curator of exhibitions including “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” at the Whitechapel Gallery (2011) in which she arranged works from the Government Art Collection in a spectrum of rainbow colors, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2014) in which she curated a black and white room and “FOUND” at the Foundling Museum (2016) in which she and sixty-eight other artists responded to the eponymous theme. Recently, as official Election Artist for the UK’s 2017 general election (the first female artist in the role), Parker documented the distress and panic of a time fraught with political instability and terrorist attacks, by way of two films and a series of photographs. Her appointment could prompt a more political reading of her work from here on, as it explores the aftermath of violent change (both physical and societal) and disarms the taboo. Older than the Young British Artists but younger than the previous generation, including artists Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, Parker sees herself as part of a “lost generation”, who had to work hard for their success.