EXHIBITION VISIT: Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain
TATE BRITAIN EXHIBITION
19 May until 16 October 2022
Tate Britain’s exhibition of Cornelia Parker’s work was provoking and inspiring. A visit to see her show on the 12th July coincided with development of my work towards the Final Major Project and the MA Fine Art Degree Show. Her work resonated with references to objects and methods of display. The objects in works such as 30 Pieces of Silver and Cold Dark Matter remain in their true material form, however they have been subjected to processes such as squashing, burning or blowing up. Motivated towards developing new meaning and context, she found greater scope for the work when materials had undergone a transitional development. Following the aftermath of destruction, they are hung in grids, circles or groupings which allude to a deliberate assemblage of order in contrast to the chaos previously experienced.
Black Path (Bunhill Fields) 2013, black painted bronze
Other works such as Black Path (Bunhill Fields), are traces of form rather than the actual object. Casting cracks in a path in a small London cemetery where artist William Blake and writer Daniel Defoe are buried, was a way for Parker to transport the geography to another space. A ghostly remain which depicts a form no longer there, hovers just above the floor on steel pins.
War Room (2015) is also an example of a cast or a trace of an object, but it differs from Black Path (Bunhill Fields) in that the work is made up of the remains of material rather than a substance mixed purposefully by Parker. The manufactured offcuts leftover from a production of poppies made for Remembrance Day, become a fabric, draped along the ceiling and down the walls of an interior space. Reminding me of the inside of a marquee set up for a party or a wedding, it is only when I looked closely that I recognised the familiar shape of the poppy. A symbol of Remembrance, and an important yearly event, the manufactured nature alluded to in the work, reminds us of the practicalities of production and the insignificance of many. This is a powerful message, as soldiers who lose their lives at war are in a way, part of an assembly line, and it is important to remember each one as an individual.
War Room, 2015