ARTISTS - Installation, Spaces

Cornelia Parker

Frith Street Gallery
Exhibition of new works by Cornelia Parker.

7 March 2008 – 23 April 2008

Parker is known for her intriguing installations of found and manipulated objects. She often focuses on people, places and ideas that are so established in the public consciousness they have become monuments, or even clichés. From a feather extracted from Sigmund Freud’s pillow to flattened brass band, from a silver spoon to the height of Niagara Falls – the artist’s work ranges from the microscopic to the epic, conceptually unravelling icons of both high and low culture.

Central to the exhibition are a series of new sculptural pieces each entitled Transitional Object. These take the form of shelters made from nets suspended from the gallery ceiling. The installation evokes a temporary encampment, the nets drape and overlap, the moiré of black meshes resembling minimalist drawings in three dimensions.

In other works Parker explores the idea of ‘Latent News’, a surrealist game in which newspaper articles are cut into individual words and phrases and rapidly reassembled to make some other kind of sense. (The ‘cut-up’ technique has long been used by writers and musicians, and now has become even more ubiquitous in the form of Spam.) With the help of the innocent hand of her 6-year-old daughter, Lily, new mantras are spelled out. Exploring the idea in another way is a series of photographs – from images of discarded newspapers to the pitches staked out by newspaper photographers at the East End funeral of Reggie Kray. Also on show are a number of Bullet Drawings made by drawing lead bullets into wire – like the Transitional Objects these works have a playful relationship with early minimalism


Cornelia Parker
Transitional Object I
Net, hooks, thread and bags of lead


Cornelia Parker
Latent News, 2008
Silver Gelatin Print

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991

A garden shed and contents blown up