Viewing Room - Cornelia Parker

Endless Column IV is one of Cornelia Parker’s installations that feature found, acquired, or modified objects. A hallmark of Parker’s work is her distinctive take on the cultural and emotional content of history as embedded in the commonplace and the anonymous. To achieve the effect in Endless Column IV, Parker laid out an arrangement of familiar domestic silverware and then crushed them; the pieces becoming figuratively and literally flattened as the bowls morph into silhouette reminders of what once was. The action Parker takes in modifying such objects breaches the standard decorum and deference we bring to what is valued as precious, rare, or symbolic in our culture.

Falling Facade is a classic early suspended work composed of the artist’s signature flattened and suspended silver trophies which seem to float out of the mirror’s surface and escape its bounds. The mirror rests on an easel, that might support a painter’s canvas or a classroom blackboard. The trophies call to mind victories in sport or essay writing while at school, proudly displayed and then gathering dust on mantelpieces across the land. The doubling of the objects in the mirror’s surface in this unusual work anticipates Parker’s Alter Ego series.

Parker’s Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs) is from an ongoing series which uses melted down bullets drawn into wire, so they somehow become a trajectory of themselves. A bullet’s worth of lead wire is threaded through paper and framed, so it looks like a pencil drawing. The grids might refer obliquely to those used by Minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt or Richard Serra, but confounding their abstract appearance is the fact that they are by the very nature of their material, ‘loaded’.

Cracked walls provide the inspiration for Prison Wall Abstract (A Man Escaped). This set of 12 photographic prints depicts the perimeter wall of Pentonville Prison in London. The damaged surface of the wall had been repaired by workmen with white filler in gestural patterns worthy of any abstract expressionist painter. Parker photographed the marks literally seconds before they were obliterated forever by a layer of magnolia paint. Later that day, after the paint was barely dry, a prisoner (incarcerated for a shot gun murder) escaped after scaling the walls.