Cornelia Parker: a viewing room

Cornelia Parker’s childhood obsession with pavement cracks was rekindled while walking with her daughter to school, playing games such as ‘Don’t Step on the Lines’ or Hopscotch. The artist began a series of works made by pouring liquid cold-cure rubber into these cracks and letting it set before lifting out the small section of the city’s geography, mapped out in stone years before, and casting it in black bronze.

Parker lived around the corner from Rhoda Street for nearly twenty years and, looking for a site where puddles appear, the pattern of the cobbles appealed to her. The poured rubber settles as rainwater would, capturing the topography of the street below at a particular moment in time and when lifted, the rubber comes up black with the dirt from the earth not far below the stone. Parker enjoys this process of capturing in bronze something apparently unheroic and ultra-mundane.

The history of any street is also imprinted with human stories. Rhoda Street, well-trodden by the artist and her family, is just off the Boundary Estate, one of the earliest social housing schemes built by a local government authority. Formerly called Peter Street, it has been home to waves of immigrants over the years.

Many of Parker’s conceptual works can also be understood as drawings. In 2015, Parker created the series Self Portrait for which she used her own blood to draw simple geometric forms such as circles, squares, triangles and parallel lines on paper. In a similar way to the Bullet Drawings, these Self Portraits seem to be, at first glance, purely abstract. By the very nature of their material, however, they reveal a human and dramatic dimension and become charged with layers of meaning. She describes this series: 'These are the ultimate self-portraits; I have used my own blood to describe man-made abstract shapes that are not truly embodied in nature except in the mind.'

Cornelia Parker’s Poison and Antidote drawings take the form of a Rorschach blots; abstract symmetrical ink blots which would be presented to patients undergoing psychoanalysis for interpretation as a means of revealing their subconscious thoughts and desires. Parker’s version is made using snake venom and its antidote, a drawing which literally contains the kill and the cure. 

Parker describes her process: ‘Over the years, I’ve made a series of these drawings. During my residency in Texas, I asked the nearby rattlesnake farm if they could milk some snakes for me (confronting another of my greatest fears). They procured enough bright yellow venom to kill at least ten people. I approached a local doctor to prescribe an antidote, a task that in the end proved a lot more difficult and expensive than acquiring the venom. I combined the poison with a quantity of black ink, and the antivenom with white ink. So in theory the resulting drawings literally have the ability to poison you and to save your life at the same time.’

Subconscious of a Monument (2002) emerged from the process of making a larger installation of the same name, using mud from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa. ‘I’ve always been drawn to the Leaning Tower of Pisa’, says Parker, ‘for its cliché value, as a monument and as the site of Galileo’s experiments with gravity.’ Parker’s interest in the Leaning Tower of Pisa led her to negotiate with the team charged with the Sisyphean task of saving it from an inevitable descent. Parker persuaded the local Italian government to allow her to ship the clay soil excavated from beneath the tower to the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin for her solo exhibition, where she displayed it as a pile of waterlogged mud. After the show it was parcelled up into plastic bags and shipped to her studio in London. Parker suspended each portion, which had dried into hardened lumps, to create a flotilla of clay fragments hovering waist high above the floor of a gallery at RIBA, London, an installation she called Subconscious of a Monument (2001–05). ‘I liked the idea of the subconscious of this monument defying gravity, given a chance to exhale and fill its own space.’

Subconscious of a Monument is one of an ongoing series of works that are suspended on wires, a technique Parker has deployed since the late 1980s. This pigment-on-glass drawing is made from drips of pigment made from the excavated soil, which had lain untouched for a millennium. In Parker’s hands, objects fall apart, collide, combust, explode or are compressed to re-emerge as new and surprisingly beautiful forms.