UNIT 1: CORNELIA PARKER

CONTEXTS

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker’s work finds meaning in, and emotional charge from, often overlooked objects. She finds such remnants, especially through a process of transformation and recontextualisation, to be a rich storehouse of history and memory, the ingenuity of which delights and surprises the viewer.

Parker’s series of bronzes made from the cracks in pavements, Black Path (Bunhill Fields) (2013) and Jerusalem (2015) are exactly the kind of Ingenius, provocative observation that I wish to emulate in my own work.

The first pavement crack cast was recorded at the burial ground of William Blake, who famously talked about seeing the world “in a grain of sand”1. The artist explicitly talks about how this concept “captured her imagination”2 and was at the forefront of her mind while making such works. We share the same interest in exploring the familiar and unseen in new contexts and turning the small and almost abstracted notion of “marginal spaces”3 such as these into the real physical world.

Furthermore, I am highly drawn to the notion that transforming such “non spaces”4 in this way can help one “find a new truth” in them5. That my own traces of making might show something of the “mysterious aura” of the history in making6. My thinking concerning transforming simple scratches and marks in the print room into something physical, tangible has been bolstered by Parker’s work and has given me permission to think about making my own sculptural iterations which I will proceed to research further7. I am also aware of the differences in my work to parkers. Although she describes her castes as like a “kind of petrified line drawing” they are inherently unchanged by the artist’s hand8. My work has something more expressive that comes from specifically from the medium of drawing that demands change and evolution for the work to grow and bring the process of making to life. The inherently conceptual nature of my work coupled with the expressive nature of drawing will be a challenging aspect of my practice.

Foot Notes

Blake, W., Auguries of Innocence
Parker, C., Griffiths, M., Thorpe, G. and Whitworth Art Gallery, Cornelia Parker, Manchester: The Whitworth, (2014) p122
Ibid p60
Ibid p61
Ibid p39
Ibid p44
I was particularly enthralled when, in an interview, parker mentions her attempt to cast a shaft of light as a student. Ibid p109
Ibid p60, see again

Cornelia Parker, Black patinated bronze cast of pavement cracks in path through William Blake’s burial ground, 2013, 340 x 250 x 9 cm, Whitworth Gallery ©