Cornelia Parker Page 2

Inhaled Clifts

1996

Sheets starched with chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover

I love the creativity that blossoms around battles with authority, such as attempting to conceal secret contraband. I asked Customs and Excise officials about the ways people try to smuggle drugs into the country. This work was inspired by an ingenious example: drugs used to 'starch' garments. I starched bedsheets with chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover. smuggling the cliffs into bed to explore the idea of sleeping between two cliffs.

Exhaled Cocaine

1996

Incinerated cocaine

A thorny run-in with US Customs officials gave me a perverse desire to work with Customs and Excise in the UK. I got to know the team at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. They agreed to give me some confiscated cocaine. They gave me a big black bin-liner full, a million pounds' worth burnt to a cinder. I love the theatrical way they destroy illicitly smuggled contraband, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.

The Distance

(With Concealed Weapon)

2003

A mile of string (once used to wrap a Rodin, and vandalised by a Stuckist), hidden object This is the string I used to wrap Rodin's The Kiss. My work was vandalised by a group of Stuckists an art group opposed to conceptual art] who cut the string into pieces. I tied it back together and re-wrapped the sculpture, later making this new work by wrapping the string around a secret weapon.

3 COLD DARK MATTER:

AN EXPLODED VIEW

*We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict, I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it's the place where you store things you can't quite throw away.

The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects.

In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can't be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine's parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.

Red Hot Poker Drawings

2009-13

Paper folded and burnt with a hot poker These are my most Catholic works, inspired by the Turin Shroud and the fate of Edward Il. The Shroud has a Rorschach-style pattern of burns made by drops of molten silver. It was stored in a chapel folded up and housed in a silver casket. There was a fire, and the Shroud was damaged with symmetrical burns after being saved by being dowsed with water. The burnt holes were later patched by nuns, and the water stains still remain. I studied the play Edward Il by Christopher Marlowe, Edward dies by being disemboweled by a red hot poker.

Poison and Antidote Drawings

2010-13

Rattlesnake venom and black ink, anti-venom and white ink on paper While I was on a residency in Texas, US, I asked the nearby rattlesnake farm if they could milk some snakes for me. They procured enough bright yellow venom to kill at least ten people. I then approached a local doctor to prescribe an antidote. I combined the poison with black ink, and the anti-venom with white ink. In theory, these drawings could poison you and save your life at the same time.

Red Abstract

2001

Brick dust from the house that fell off the White

Cliffs of Dover and glass on paper

White Abstract

2001

Chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover on paper

4 ABSTRACTION

If I could somehow plumb their depths, tap into their inner essence, I might find an unknown place, which by its very nature is abstract... both representational and abstract at the same time.

Parker consistently works with abstract forms, but she undermines the idea of the non-representational character of abstraction by instilling it with narrative content. Each of the abstract works displayed in this room tells a human story, referring to a particular incident or chance encounter. An escaped convict in Prison Wall Abstract, the poet William Blake in Black Path, or a battle between life and death in Poison and Antidote provide captivating background and counterpoint to the formal restraint of abstraction, connecting it to everyday life.

Black Path (Bunhill Fields)

2013

Black painted bronze

Playing hopscotch with my daughter on the way to school rekindled an obsession with pavement cracks, dormant since my own childhood. I poured liquid rubber into some of the cracks in a path in Bunhill Fields, a small London cemetery where artist William Blake (1757-1827) and writer Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731) are buried. When the rubber dried, I could lift up the geography of the city. I cast the captured cracks in bronze, then placed them on steel pins so that they seem to hover just above the floor.

Verso

2016

9 photographs, inkjet print on paper I photographed the backs of the cards that had buttons sewn onto them. When you looked at the cards the right way round, the buttons were displayed in neat rows. But when you flipped them over, you got this beautiful abstract line drawing, made of the thread used to sew the buttons onto the card. They were all so different and read as a kind of alternative, subconscious display.

Bullet Drawings

2008, 2010, 2011, 2018

Lead from bullets, melted down and drawn into wire, threaded through paper These works are made from various types of bullets that have been melted down together. The melted lead is then 'drawn' (pulled through a series of ever smaller holes) to form wire. The grid-like structures suggest nets, snares or crosshairs, freezing the bullets' trajectories. Because they are made of lead, each grid resembles marks made by a pencil.

Pornographic Drawings

1996-7

Ferric oxide on paper

To make these works, I had to develop a relationship with the UK Customs and Excise headquarters. I asked them for confiscated contraband, and they offered me chopped up pornographic videotape. I dissolved the tape in solvent to make my own ink. With this, I made a series of Rorschach blots, a tool used in psychology. What a person sees in the abstract shapes reveals information about their personality. Somehow, my blots turned out to be particularly explicit.

Prison Wall Abstract

(A Man Escaped)

2012-13

12 photographs, digital print on paper I travel past London's Pentonville Prison daily on the way to my studio. One day, I observed workers busy repairing the cracks in the perimeter wall, creating gestural patterns with white filler. I had been admiring their mark-making, then I saw that they were beginning to paint the walls. Within minutes, the prison abstracts would be obliterated, so I quickly captured them on my phone. A few hours later, that same day, a murderer escaped from the prison after scaling the walls.

6 FILMS

Parker has been making films since 2007. Whether using her iPhone or a drone, single or multi-channel projections, sound or silence, all her films engage with politics in different ways. Made in Bethlehem is a subtle response to the complexities of politics in the Middle East. On a visit to Palestine just before Easter in 2012, Parker filmed a Muslim man, Muhammad Hussein Ba-our and his son weaving crowns of thorns for Christian pilgrims. War Machine 2015 shows the production of Remembrance Day poppies in a slow reveal, the mechanical process reminiscent of old film reels. Parker became the Uk's first female official Election Artist in 2017. She followed the campaigns with daily observations in over 1,500 images and films on her Instagram feed, which turned into Election Abstract She also used an eerie night-time House of Commons as the location for Left Right & Centre and Thatcher's Finger. Parker created FLAG, shot in a Swansea flag factory in February 2022, especially for this exhibition.

Parker's first film, an interview with the acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky about ecological threats and US politics, Chomskian Abstract is shown outside the exhibition in the 1780 room

AMERICAN GOTHIC

"I shot these on an iPhone in New York in 2016. One video was filmed outside Trump Tower the week before he was elected. All his followers were there, chanting like extras in a horror movie. The other three videos were based on Greenwich Village Halloween night, just after the parade had broken up. All the American archetypes, good and evil, seemed to be there from Freddy Kruger, Hannibal Lecter and scary clowns, to the cast of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy et al. It was very amplified and filmic

Movie coming soon

8 POLITICS

This is the time we all need to politically engage. We need art more than ever because it's like a digestive system, a way of processing. In addition to film, Parker's commitment to politics and social justice is shown through her photography, sculpture, drawing and the act of collective embroidery, as shown in this room. Collaboration is central to Parker's working process.

In the Blackboard drawings she worked with school children of different primary school age groups, and Magna Carta (An Embroidery) involved over 200 people, each stitching different key words particular to their situation. They include Baroness Doreen Lawrence. who stitched the words justice denial' and delay: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who stitched 'user's manual and Edward Snowden who stitched the word Liberty".

Magna Carta (An Embroidery)

2015

Half Panama cotton fabric, pearl cotton thread

and other media

The Magna Carta was the first document to establish that everyone is subject to the law and has a right to justice. I took an image of the Wikipedia entry of the Magna Carta on its 799th birthday and had it printed onto a 14-metre-long piece of fabric. The fabric was cut into around 80 strips and distributed to over 200 people to hand embroider. A large part of the text was sewn by prisoners from 12 different jails. Members of the Embroiderer's Guild fabricated the illustrations. Various human rights lawyers, MPs, Barons and Baronesses, whistleblowers and journalists each sewed a word or two. I like the idea of input from many pairs of hands, crowdsourced like Wikipedia which has contributions made by hundreds of people imparting their knowledge, rather than one authority figure.

I wanted to do something with primary school children because they have this innocence, this incorruptibility.

I selected a series of headlines from newspapers and then asked the children to copy them onto blackboards.

Most of the children, whatever their age, wanted to copy a headline mentioning Trump, the Bogey Man, always in the news.

Each news item related to the equivalent children's age group. The five-year-old's grasp of language and world affairs versus to that of a ten-year-old was poignant. These children are going to have to live with the consequences of the news.

Spilt Milk (Jerusalem)

Oil Stain (Bethlehem)

Cloud Burst (Jerusalem)

Broken View (Mount of Olives,

Jerusalem

2012

4 photographs, -print on paper

On a visit to the Holy Land, I heard that some devout pilgrims developed a mental health condition known as Jerusalem Syndrome' on visiting the city. This is often characterised by visual or spiritual delusions. A blemish on the pavement, or a crack in a wall might suddenly appear to resemble the face of Jesus.

These images are a small selection of the hundreds I captured during my time as an Election artist. I used them for my Instagram feed and later for my film animation Election Artist 2018

We know who we are. We know what you have done

2008

Struck silver (one medal, design on both sides) I was one of ten artists commissioned to make a 'Medal of Dishonour' for an exhibition at the British Museum. My medal features the backs of two heads (no tails). These are modelled on Tony Blair and George W Bush, the British and US leaders who spearheaded the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But because they're faceless on the medal, their identity is left ambiguous. They stand in for any faceless politician or bureaucrat, any man in a suit, corrupted by power.

World Coming Apart at the Seams

2017

Photograph, digital print on paper

Avoided Object.

Photographs of the sky above the Imperial War Museum taken with the camera that belonged to Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz

1999

4 photographs, silver gelatin print on paper

I asked the Imperial War Museum if I could use the camera that belonged to Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He used it to photograph his familv. Who knows if it recorded the horrors of the prison camp too? I was allowed to take the camera outside the museum and photograph the sky. Capturing clouds somehow seemed appropriate. If was a way of averting my mind from the fact I was looking through the same aperture as a mass murderer. The camera was loaded with infrared film, making the resulting images appear more sinister than benign.

7 WAR ROOM

"I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families.

When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because Obviously a lot of people didn't come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there's something like 300000 holes, and there's many more lives lost than that.

I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It's based on the magnificent tent which Henry Vill had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.

9 ISLAND

When I was a child, we had a market garden and grew large quantities of tomatoes in greenhouses. To protect them from the harsh summer sun we would whitewash the windows. Later, as an artist, I wanted to find a meaningful material to make whitewash with. The chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover has figured significantly in my work over the years. I love it as a classic drawing material and its role as a patriotic feature of our coastline. It literally marks the edge of England.

For Island I've painted the panes of glass of a greenhouse with white brushstrokes of cliff chalk, like chalking time. So the glass house becomes enclosed, inward looking, a vulnerable domain, a little England with a cliff-face veil. The Island in question is our own. In our time of Brexit, alienated from Europe, Britain is emptied out of Europeans just when we need them most.

The spectre of the climate crisis is looming large: with crumbling coastlines and rising sea levels, things seem very precarious.The greenhouse sits on a foundation made from worn encaustic tiles (from the Houses of Parliament) that once lined the corridors:of power. Their patterns have been rubbed away by cumulative footfalls made by MPs and Lords in the years since 1847.

The light inside the greenhouse slowly pulses, breathing in and out like a lighthouse. The white chalk strokes throw dark shadow moirés on the wall. What is white becomes black, and what was stable is now uneasily shifting.

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