Cornelia Parker
(1956 - ) |
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intervention with site-specific work, large-scale installations Art Work
| Name: |
Cornelia Parker |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Cheshire, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
English |
| Birth: |
1956 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
intervention with site-specific work, large-scale installations |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Contemporary |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Installation
Sculpture
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Biography
Parker's work can be understood in relation to currents in late twentieth century sculpture. She has some affinity with the group who came to be known as 'New British Sculptors' in the late 1970s and 1980s (including Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow). Breaking with the sculptural tradition of the monumental and processes such as carving, their work combined conceptual titles with found objects, bringing wider associations of contemporary life and society into play. Also an influence (as with Mona Hatoum) is the Arte Povera artist Piero Manzoni, who used the most economic of means to create works of complex significance, and has a clear parallel in the charged simplicity of Parker's practice.
A fascination with objects, their historical and memorial significance, and the way in which institutions (not only museums, but also social institutions, such as marriage) imbue them with significance, has shaped a long series of Parker's works. Her Avoided Objects includes a set of four photographs of the sky from 1999. They seem banal, but they have been taken by a camera in the collections of the Imperial War Museum that was formerly owned by the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, like Susan Hiller and Sarah Lucas, Parker has also worked at the Freud Museum, intervening in a place devoted to celebrating the memory of the father of psychoanalysis (her practice of presenting pieces in vitrines is similar to the strategy sometimes adopted by Hiller, and used influentially by Joseph Beuys). Parker included Freud's furnishings, a distinctive cushion and rug normally preserved in his museum, in an exhibition made in collaboration with the actress Tilda Swinton, The Maybe, held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995. Also on show were an odd collection of seemingly unprepossessing objects, a stocking, a quill pen, a pair of ice skates. If these were anonymous, they would not merit a second look, but the stocking once belonged to Queen Victoria, the pen to Charles Dickens and the skates to Wallis Simpson, giving them a magical power to draw the attention. Parker plays upon our need for secular relics to replace those of religion. But by breaking these objects out of their usual 'frame' (the museum display forming a narrative of a famous life), Parker opens up the possibility for a flood of different associations.
The Maybe included a piece which captured the attention of gallery-goers and the media alike, a glass case in which Swinton lay, apparently asleep. It suggested several possible layers of interpretation. There is the story of Snow White, in which a girl lies in a glass coffin, under an evil spell, and can only be awoken by a prince's kiss. Snow White is a children's story, but also a symbolic tale of female sexual awakening. And by displaying a living woman in a case usually used for museum artifacts, Parker also summons up the history of woman as iconic art object, pleasurable to look at, only to make such an act of looking problematic. Walking around the piece, the fascinating proximity to Swinton was undercut by an unsettling awareness that she might open her eyes.
Parker's exposure and destruction of received functions and meanings has parallels with feminist practice, particularly its critique of social rituals and values. Wedding ring drawing (circumference of a living room) {1996) is made out of two gold bands stretched into fine wire. It is a simple, delicate, but succinct meditation on the way in which domestic life and sexual relations are bounded by social conventions, while even the title of Twenty Years of Tarnish (Wedding Presents) (1996) suggests that marriage is more to do with wear and decay than dewy-eyed sentiment. Embryo Firearms {1995) and Embryo Money {1996) relate developing life to the as yet blank metal templates for guns and coins, questioning the attribution of enormous power to objects which begin their lives as lumps of metal. |
Samples of Work
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