Cornelia Parker
Cornelia Parker’s approach to making art has been described as that of a particle physicist, known for her deconstructions that are as coherent conceptually as they are fragmented visually.
Her work is infused with wit, elegance and erudition. She is intrigued by the clichéd symbolic properties of the most mundane items and the presence objects acquire through their associations.
Her photographs, installations and manipulated objects do not rely on fixed meaning for their effect, rather they exploit a resonant series of visual and verbal associations to provide open fields for our imaginative exploration.
Burning, melting, dissolving, crushing, shooting and exploding are all methods the artist uses to wrest a particular and strange poetry from matter. What could be seen as mere débris is transformed into something beautiful and compelling, created by destructive forces both natural and man-made.
'I’m concerned with ambivalence, with opposites, with inhaling and exhaling, things falling and things rising, things disintegrating and coming back together …with killing things off, as if they existed in cartoon comics, and then resurrecting them, so that one set of references is negated as a new one takes its place.' – Cornelia Parker
Parker’s work ranges in scale from the monumental to the microscopic. In this, her first solo show at Frith Street Gallery, she has created two new suspended works – one of charred wood, one of white chalk – which resurrect in sculptural form two edifices which have crumbled in dramatic circumstances. Through microscopic magnification Einstein’s Abstracts transform the gestures of Einstein’s equations into images which evoke the cosmos with all its associations of time and space.
