Artists can’t make art without being creative. Cornelia Parker is the perfect example for that. Ever since she was a little girl and liked to place coins on railway tracks to watch them violently transformed, crushed into imaginative works of art, Parker created her own type of art.
Since the late 1980s, Parker has produced some of the most interesting works in modern art by harnessing everything from plastic explosives to steamrollers, snake venom to the very blade of the guillotine that lopped off the head of Marie Antoinette. An example piece of her work is Thirty Pieces of Silver ( 1988 – 1989 ). She made this work by driving a steamroller over more than 1,000 silver and silver-plated objects. The flattened teapots and trombones, baby spoons and cigarette cases had been gathered from car boot sales, markets, and the second-hand stall that she helped run at Portobello market in London. Freed from their former shapes and utilitarian functions, the rumpled tableware, trophies and instruments were divided into 30 separate pools, or “discs”, of polished rubble that Parker then dangled poetically from long wires a few inches from the floor. The art in this piece and many others shows the bruised, broken and battered fragments of life in an indestructible beauty – small fragments of paper, suspended remnants of a garden shed, much more mixed together in an unique way.
“Everything just sort of weaves together,” Parker tells BBC Culture, reflecting on the sight of so much of her life’s creative effort gathered in one place. “The Tate [ dark matter, restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army ] owns all my major works, so they just had to get them out of the old archive. I’ve got a piece where I wrap Rodin’s The Kiss up in string. They own The Kiss, and they’ll allow me to re-enact my work.” Re-enactment is a crucial aspect of Parker’s imagination and art, which often ropes our eyes into seeing familiar objects as if for the first time.
As it is with all of Parker’s works, there is more at play than what meets the eye which leads into the true story of art. The story of her art is the story of destruction – of pummelling things into unexpected expressiveness. From its very inception, this art is wreckage resurrected in a way.
Sources
● https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220621-cornelia-parker-the-artist-who-likes-to-blow-things-up
● https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949/story-cold-dark-matter
Since the late 1980s, Parker has produced some of the most interesting works in modern art by harnessing everything from plastic explosives to steamrollers, snake venom to the very blade of the guillotine that lopped off the head of Marie Antoinette. An example piece of her work is Thirty Pieces of Silver ( 1988 – 1989 ). She made this work by driving a steamroller over more than 1,000 silver and silver-plated objects. The flattened teapots and trombones, baby spoons and cigarette cases had been gathered from car boot sales, markets, and the second-hand stall that she helped run at Portobello market in London. Freed from their former shapes and utilitarian functions, the rumpled tableware, trophies and instruments were divided into 30 separate pools, or “discs”, of polished rubble that Parker then dangled poetically from long wires a few inches from the floor. The art in this piece and many others shows the bruised, broken and battered fragments of life in an indestructible beauty – small fragments of paper, suspended remnants of a garden shed, much more mixed together in an unique way.
“Everything just sort of weaves together,” Parker tells BBC Culture, reflecting on the sight of so much of her life’s creative effort gathered in one place. “The Tate [ dark matter, restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army ] owns all my major works, so they just had to get them out of the old archive. I’ve got a piece where I wrap Rodin’s The Kiss up in string. They own The Kiss, and they’ll allow me to re-enact my work.” Re-enactment is a crucial aspect of Parker’s imagination and art, which often ropes our eyes into seeing familiar objects as if for the first time.
As it is with all of Parker’s works, there is more at play than what meets the eye which leads into the true story of art. The story of her art is the story of destruction – of pummelling things into unexpected expressiveness. From its very inception, this art is wreckage resurrected in a way.
Sources
● https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220621-cornelia-parker-the-artist-who-likes-to-blow-things-up
● https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949/story-cold-dark-matter
