When visiting the Cornelia Parker exhibition in Tate Britain I was faced with objects and mediums that evoked powerful messages about life and the live we live. I instantly realised that walking through her work would be a memorable experience as she forces you to contemplate on what you see.
“If you start with a found object, that object already has a history to draw on.”
Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain
Cornelia mainly works with existing and ordinary objects and translates them by crushing, flattening, dissecting or transforming them into another form. I found she uses light as a tool to create shadows of her pieces on the walls of the exhibit rooms, each installation having a different reason for this. Her ‘Thirty pieces of silver’ installation holds various household items, mainly dinnerware. I found the shadows created are a reminiscent memory of what they used to be, acting as a reminder of their past functionality. The installation itself consists of items which hold a sentimental value yet they can lose this value by simply being flattened and are essentially just pieces of metal or of raw material. Her elevating her work revives the flattened objects, bringing them to life by adding dimension and power as if they are weightless or lifting themselves or being lifted. Parker chooses silver homogeneously covered objects which could be her way of placing value back into them. In conjunction this could lose their value and unique qualities by allowing them to look the same and obscuring their different forms.
With ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ she had the Royal Artillery detonate a shed and inside its contents. The shadows create a double explosion in a sense, exemplifying the destructiveness and motion of the detonation. This and her suspending the work creates a feeling that it is still moving inwards/outwards and that time has stopped. I am able to observe the process of destruction. I am also able to observe what objects the shed holds, with the shadows and pieces of wood concealing the objects making it difficult to see what they are, leaving it to my own imagination and interpretation. I found it eerie and it reminded me of a baby mobile, with the suspending objects.
“My work is consistently 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, Tate Britain
I found the use of shadows in ‘Perpetual Canon’ to mimic the idea of a silent marching band and I could become one of these mute players, as I place myself between the shadows and the objects. There was a sense of transparency as my own shadow was created and I could be positioned within the shadows of the instruments and have my silhouette even hold a trumpet. I loved the configuration of the objects in a circle. It felt as if it was an endless loop of music we could not hear that once took place in reality but now is no longer present like an echo.
Parker’s use of a single light source, generally centered in the middle of her works, felt to me as an energy source that drew my attention to the center and then work my way outwards. It drew everything to an origin, a cause, and made her work feel cohesive. She uses an unshaded lightbulb which added a starkness and vulnerability to her installations, and it allowed her pieces to create the shade and contrasting shadows which extend and project the explosion and her hidden messages into the walls that I walk past.
Overall, I found her work to be a poignant experience of storytelling in the everyday and her political views with the collaboration of common objects, people and methods that altogether get her ideas across. I loved how she has a reason for everything in her process and it all ties in with the theme of her pieces.