Cornelia Parker’s art of drones, dark matter and detonations

From ancient clods removed from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa to feathers shed by pillows on Sigmund Freud’s couch, found objects come in all shapes and sizes in Cornelia Parker’s work — and few go to waste. In 2017 the artist made a film in the House of Commons and came away with a pallet-load of worn floor tiles created by the building’s 19th-century architect, Augustus Pugin. Those tiles are about to resurface in “Island”, an installation she is making for an exhibition opening at Tate Britain later this month. 

“I’m still in the middle of making the work,” she confesses, when we speak via Zoom. “Having a gun to your head always helps the decision-making process.” 

The tiles, which have borne a century and a half of politicians’ footfalls, will form the “carpet-like” floor of a greenhouse painted over with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover. A gently pulsing light inside will throw shadows on the wall. “I think this might be a Brexit piece,” she muses.

The political developments of the past few years have clearly shaken Parker. In New York, in October 2016, for a commission on the roof of the Met, she began to film the crowds gathering outside Trump Tower. Within a few days its owner had been elected president and Parker felt a disorienting sense of the world order changing. “You feel so powerless,” she says. 

Back home in Britain it prompted her to engage. When invited to be an official election artist in the run-up to the snap poll of June 2017, she agreed. “I thought: immerse myself in the horror? Why not?” The first woman to be commissioned, she was off around the country filming and photographing election rallies, simultaneously appalled and amused by the “brutish guys in suits” at Ukip gigs and thrilled when cartoonist Steve Bell could point out rightwing journalists in the flesh.

Her main output was “Left, Right and Centre”, a short, dramatic film made in an empty House of Commons using a drone. Initially unseen, the drone passes through the house, illuminating stacks of newspapers, arranged according to their political slant (FT in the centre, Parker recalls). Next day, the drone returns, dive-bombing the newspapers and creating mayhem, before flying into darkness. “I felt the drone gave a view, looking down on parliament, that you never get,” she says.

Parker, 65, is best-known for “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” (1991), a detonated garden shed, frozen in mid-blast. Made when the artist was less than a decade out of college, the installation was acquired four years later by Tate, which would also purchase her “Thirty Pieces of Silver” (1988) in 1998.

Older than Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, but younger than Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, Parker has ploughed her own furrow, spying the aesthetic and political potential in (often barely there) found objects to create installations and sculpture, films, drawings and photography. In the case of “War Room” (2015), made from fabric from which first world war commemorative poppies have been cut, the object is alluded to by its absence. Sometimes she “spirals back”, as she puts it, to find new interest in an old idea, which has resulted, for example, in variations on “Cold Dark Matter” installed in the Phoenix Art Museum and de Young museum in San Francisco.

“The Maybe”, a 1995 monument to sleep, for which the actress Tilda Swinton slept through the show in a glass vitrine, included a display of “relics”, from Queen Victoria’s stocking to a pillow from Freud’s couch and the last provisions of doomed Antarctic explorer Robert Scott. The latter was a bag of curry powder which she recalls opening rather too fast (“Oh my God, I’ve just inhaled Scott’s last provisions!”). Many of these objects fed into an array of surprising small works: “I put one of the feathers from Freud’s pillow on a glass slide and projected it along the wall so it looks like it has been shot from a bow and arrow,” she explains. 

For her exhibition, Tate will re-loan Parker “The Kiss” by Rodin — the ultimate “found object”, surely — which in 2003 she wrapped in a mile of string, an allusion to the tricky complexity of romantic entanglements. She reminds me of the hoo-ha the work caused at first, with some people feeling she was disrespectful to Rodin, and the Stuckists, always roiled by conceptual art, taking a pair of scissors to it. 

Disciplined as Parker’s work is, it is also playful, questioning, open-ended. “I don’t think there are any set meanings to my works. They are reservoirs of stuff that can be triggered by whoever is looking at the work. That’s what it should be, a catalyst really, in the way music is. You listen and you don’t worry about what the intention of the composer was. You allow the music to transport you. For me that is how art is.

“Artists represent freedom of thought and expression,” she continues. “An artist may not know where their art comes from, but it’s there, it’s born, it’s in the world and it’s doing a certain thing. Without it, I feel the brains of mankind would be very different. They would have very different neural pathways.”

“Cold Dark Matter” is a beautiful snapshot of violence, its chaotic potential checked by a precise grid. In our war-torn world, the piece feels right at home: has its meaning changed for Parker over the years? “Thirty years ago, it was more to do with fear of IRA explosions,” she says. “It was always about freezing the moment and looking at it very carefully. Now it’s like a universal bomb.” 

Parker made the work with Jonathan Watkins, then director of east London’s Chisenhale gallery, and the British Army carried out the explosion. Was it difficult to persuade them to do it? “The army was very gung-ho,” she says. “We went to see them and they blew up all kinds of things just to show us what they could do!”

The child of a tyrannical father, who made his daughters work hard on their small farm in rural Cheshire, Parker had to sneak off in secret if she wanted to play. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia and was frequently in hospital. “You never felt secure: there was no rhyme or reason to my father’s tempers,” Parker says. She visited a museum for the first time at the age of 15, and it proved a step towards liberation. She spent a year at Gloucester College of Art & Design before studying at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, then completing an MFA at Reading University (1980-82), before moving to London. 

The unhappiness of her childhood has led her to cherish the experience of motherhood and bringing up her daughter Lily, now 20. “Through her childhood, it was almost as if I was having my own childhood, “she says. “We had a childhood together.”

Parker’s invitation to be an election artist was prompted in part by connections she forged while making “Magna Carta”, an ambitious 13-metre embroidery piece commissioned by Oxford university’s Ruskin School of Art and the British Library. Most of the stitching was done by prisoners, but Parker invited 200 people, including MPs, peers and lawyers, to contribute to the work. She visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy to enlist his involvement, had a friend track down Edward Snowden in Russia and persuaded lawyer Clive Stafford Smith to stitch his contribution while visiting a client in Guantánamo Bay. 

Today as an RA, with an OBE and at least four honorary doctorates, Parker is in demand in academic circles. An honorary professor at Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 2016-19, she was appointed an honorary fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 2020. In recent years, projects at the Royal Academy, the Whitechapel and the Foundling Museum, once a hospital for abandoned children, have enabled Parker to try her hand as a curator. 

In 2016, at the Foundling Museum, she asked 60 fellow artists to produce objects evoking the fact that mothers were encouraged to leave tokens by which they could recognise their babies if they were able to reclaim them. The show chimed with the issues of the day, much in the way Parker’s own politically attuned art does. Gavin Turk produced a cast of a homeless man’s sleeping bag, which Parker placed in an ornate room beneath a portrait of a benefactress, while Gormley’s sculpture of a baby prompted memories of the migrant crisis and little boy whose body had washed up on a Turkish beach the previous year.

Alongside “Island”, the other new work in the Tate show will be “Flag”. In a factory in Swansea, Parker recorded the complex process of making a Union Jack. Then, in a six-minute film she reverses the process, “unmaking” the flag and restoring the fabric to the bales of cloth each piece had come from. “Like ‘Island’, it’s about this thing that is unstable and possibly coming apart,” she says. “I’m hoping ‘Flag’ will be a bit of sympathetic magic to stop that happening.”

May 19-October 16, tate.org.uk

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