ART-PRESENTATION: Cornelia Parker

One of the most important artists working today, Cornelia Parker is known for her transformation of everyday objects into unexpected, haunting scenarios – things are exploded, shot, turned back to front and rearranged in often surprising ways. Working with sculpture and installation, as well as drawing, photography and film, Parker subjects are presented at the very moment of their transformation, suspended in time and completely still.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MCA Archive

Cornelia Parker’s solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA),  is the largest presentation of the artist’s work in Australia and encompasses over 40 artworks from the late 1980s to the present. Spanning three decades of the artist’s practice, this exhibition brings together new and recent artworks with significant loans from major Public and Private collections, including two large-scale installations “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” and “Thirty Pieces of Silver” from Tate Collection. In the 1990s, Parker began to experiment with what she called “Avoided Objects”. These include objects that have been squashed, burnt or exploded; the backs or underbellies of objects; objects only partially formed; objects that are avoided socially or psychologically; and non-objects like cracks, creases and shadows. Although readymades and found objects have been prevalent in contemporary art since the early 1900s, these works re-ignite this practice for contemporary art today; shift emphasis on to the actual objects’ uses and pasts, and help us to better understand our own embodied relationship to things. The installation “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” (1991),  is  an ordinary garden shed that has been blown up by the British Army and reconfigured by Parker into a mass of burnt wooden shards and household objects. Suspended from the ceiling with a single light bulb at the centre, it casts dramatic shadows across the gallery walls and floor. “Thirty Pieces of Silver” (1988–89), comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver Parker commented on the work “Silver is commemorative, the objects are landmarks in people’s lives. I wanted to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth, that is why I flattened them, consigning them all to the same fate. As a child I used to crush coins on a railway track – you couldn’t spend the money afterwards but you kept the metal slivers for their own sake, as an imaginative currency and as physical proof of the destructive powers of the world. I find the pieces of silver have much more potential when their meaning as everyday objects has been eroded. “Thirty Pieces of Silver” is about materiality and then about anti-matter. In the gallery the ruined objects are ghostly levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation. The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece”. “Subconscious of a Monument” (2001–05) is comprising thousands of dried lumps of earth excavated by engineers from under the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. In her installation “War Room” (2015), Parker salvages discarded strips of red paper from the Poppy Factory in Richmond, London, which produces Remembrance Poppies to memorialise the Great War of 1914–18.  The paper is perforated by over 30,000 holes where the poppy shapes have been removed; signifying human lives lost in conflict. Also included in the exhibition is “Magna Carta (An Embroidery)” (2015), a 12-metre long embroidery hand-stitched by over 200 individuals that recreates the Magna Carta Wikipedia entry, including British prison inmates and well-known individuals, such as Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of M15), Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger (former editor of the Guardian UK), musician Jarvis Cocker and Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia). Politics is a key theme in many of the artist’s recent works, and in 2017 Cornelia Parker was appointed as the first female Election Artist for the United Kingdom General Election. In this highly visible role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, met with politicians, campaigners and voters and produced artworks in response. Three works feature in the exhibition including “Left Right & Centre” (2017), which was filmed by a drone at night in the House of Commons, Westminster; “Thatcher’s Finger” (2018), a shadowplay featuring a sculpture of the former Prime Minister; and “Election Abstract” (2018), a visual journal of Parker’s experiences of the snap election that were posted on the artist’s Instagram feed.

Info: Curator: Rachel Kent, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA),  140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney, Duration 8/11/19-16/2/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed 10:00-21:00, www.mca.com.au