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The British artist has a major show opening at London's Tate Britain, and about time too
In 1991, Cornelia Parker decided to blow up a garden shed. The shed didn’t belong to any-one in particular; in fact, it was a composite, built from various bits of other sheds, and filled with the tools and toys and general life-detritus that Parker had collected from friends and neighbours and car-boot sales. Parker asked the Army School of Ammunition if they would explode the shed for her, and to her surprise they said yes. After they’d done it, Parker gathered up the charred and shattered fragments and suspended them on wires around a single bare lightbulb. She called the piece “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View”. Later, the owners of an old pram that her neighbours had donated came back for it, but it was too late. “It was part of an artwork!” she chuckles.
“There were bombs going off in London because of the IRA, so I blew something up myself,” says the 65-year-old artist, who is tall and friendly and wears her hair in an ultra-short bob that has become something of a trademark. We are sitting at the kitchen table in her home in north London, which doubles as her studio (she is married, and has a 20-year-old daughter). Parker saw the blast as a way of embodying the fear: “You know, when you explode something, things can’t be damaged any more.” Conversely, by suspending the remnants, Parker sought to undo the violence she had initiated: “That’s me trying to put it back together again.”
“Cold Dark Matter” will be one of around 100 works from Parker’s diverse and inventive artistic career, for which she was nominated for the 1997 Turner Prize and awarded an OBE in 2010, that will be in her new solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London. Surprisingly, given her pre-eminence in the field — her scaled-down replica of the gothic Bates home from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho caused something of a sensation when it was installed on the top-floor terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2016, and again two years later, in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London — it is her first major show in the capital since 1998.
It will be a chance, she says, to “get the old favourites out”, such as the shed and “30 Pieces of Silver”, a collection of silver objects — teapots, plates, candlesticks — which, in 1988, Parker flattened with a steamroller and then suspended just above the ground, so that they appear almost to levitate: a dinner service for the damned. (Not the Psycho house, however, which, to Parker’s mild frustration, the show’s budget can’t cover. “I wanted to put it on the roof of the Tate,” she says with a shrug.)
Parker has a habit of laughing when she talks about the darkness in her work. Like the film she made during her time as the official election artist for the UK in 2017, in a which a drone captured shadows falling across a bronze of Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons: “She looked like Nosferatu. Haha!” Or the time she came under fire for inviting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be among the human-rights lawyers, activists and academics to sew contributions onto an enormous tapestry she made in 2015 recreating the Wikipedia entry for Magna Carta, to mark its 800th anniversary: “Well I had murderers and rapists —because I had about 45 prisoners — so, you know! He fits quite well into that canon. Ha!”
Fierce reactions to her work are not unknown, such as when, in 2003, she tied a mile of string around Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss” at Tate Britain; a work that, like the embroidered Wikipedia page, is included in her new exhibition. The wrapped Rodin prompted protests the first time it was shown, and pearl-clutching in the papers — The Guardian bewailed Parker’s “destructive fantasies” — though she showed it in Manchester in 2015 and, perhaps in a sign of more enlightened times, “nobody made a whisper about it”. (The only brouhaha she has caused recently came when she posted a Wordle answer on her Instagram account:“I didn’t realise everyone was doing the same one! I got abuse raining down on me...”)
When she was growing up in Cheshire, the middle of three girls to an English father and a German mother — who had served as a nurse for the Luftwaffe — the art on the walls of the Parker family home was certainly less controversial: reproductions of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, Constable’s “The Hay Wain”, Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire”. Parker “loved them all”, but the idea of experimenting with art herself was almost unfathomable. The family kept a smallholding on which everything —from milking the cows to scything hay to stringing up tomatoes in the greenhouse — was done by hand. “There was a lot of labour,” says Parker, “and I had to forfeit play to do it. Play was what I wanted to do the most, and I suppose that’s what art is for me now: a form of play. Of work and play.”
Labour-intensiveness is perhaps a defining feature of Parker’s output: from the intricate Wikipedia tapestry to the carefully strung-up shed fragments, an idea that Parker traces back to the tomatoes in the greenhouse and “those repetitive tasks I spent my whole childhood doing”. After studying at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design and Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1970s, one of her works involved making hundreds of casts of souvenirs and nick-nacks — a tiny Empire State Building, a miniature Sacré-Cœur — out of liquid lead that she prepared on her kitchen stove. “That wasn’t a good idea,” she admits, as her cat Belle (who, unlike Wordle spoilers, is a regular feature on her Instagram feed) comes strolling into the kitchen, “though neither were lots of other things I was doing. I just liked improvising”.
Another recurring idea in Parker’s work, like the exploded-yet-suspended shed and the squashed-yet-floating silverware, is the tension between destructive and restorative instincts.She has a term for this impulse: “The workI make is almost like a sympathetic magic,” she says. “That idea that comes up in religious rites and rituals in lots of cultures, that you have to lose something to gain something. When you make sacrifices, when you put blood on the land, you will get a good harvest.”
When she made the flattened silverware, Parker explains, the house in Leytonstone she lived in was under threat of demolition to make way for the new M11 link road; she was both enacting the worst that could happen, and trying to stop it. The week after we meet, she will film Union flags being made at a factory in Swansea. Then she plans to run the footage backwards, so that the flags appear to be coming unstitched. More and more, she thinks, her work is being haunted by “ghost politics”.
As for her own legacy, something that having a show of this scale might invite, Parker is phlegmatic. She admits that it’s nice to imagine the exploded shed might be around for a while: “I like the idea of the explosion getting older and older, and it being a 100-year-old explosion, or a 200-year-old explosion. Because it becomes a kind of time capsule.” But, like all of us, Parker has bigger concerns: “I’m more worried about the future of the human race,” she says. “The way things are going, it’s not looking so great.”
Sometimes trying to stop time can be both ridiculous and sublime. A work Parker particularly likes is “Artist’s Breath”, a 1960 series by Piero Manzoni — one of the artists, alongside Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, whom she names as particular influences — for which he blew up balloons and attached them to plinths. “And museums have still got them, with no breath. It’s so funny!” Parker says, tickled at the thought of the balloons now reduced to flat splodges of decaying rubber. Still, she spares a thought for Manzoni, in some ways a kindred spirit. “I mean, he died at 29. His own sympathetic magic didn’t work.”
Cornelia Parker is at Tate Britain, London SW1, from 19 May to 22 October; tate.org.uk