'When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'You always want to be different.' I couldn't work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.'
Cornelia Parker

I recently visited an excellent retrospective of the work of British artist Cornelia Parker. (Tate Britain, London until 16 October.)

'If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.'

The exhibition brings together almost 100 works from the last 35 years. Parker finds, collects and assembles objects. She pulverises, crushes, cuts and burns them; stretches, spills, drops and explodes them – ‘making, unmaking and remaking.’ She prompts us to reflect on the meaning we attach to things; the melancholy of missed opportunities and the ever-present menace of violence in our society; the true value of creative destruction.

'I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.’

Sometimes Parker considers absences. The delicate shavings collected by a silversmith from hand-engraved inscriptions suggest unspoken words. The fine black lacquer residue left over from records cut at Abbey Road Studios evokes unheard songs. The cracks between cemetery paving slabs, cast in dark bronze, prompt a sense of danger. You better watch your step. 

'I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place.'

The work can be quite haunting.

As you wander around an array of crushed brass instruments hung in a circular space, you notice the shadows thown against white walls. Parker intends the piece to bring to mind ‘a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo.’ As you walk through a big tent made from the red material left behind after Remembrance Day poppies have been cut away, you are inevitably prompted to think of wasted lives. 

'I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.’

Parker presents us with objects that have a problematic future - the steel that will become a Colt 45, the blank discs that will become coins – and with materials that have a grim past. A bag of incinerated cocaine is arranged in an elegant pile. Pornographic videotapes, dissolved in solvent, form suggestive inkblots. A gun is reduced to a heap of red rust. 

‘If you start with a found object, that object already has a history to draw on.’

These things are in a constant state of becoming and having been. They are on a journey. And in recasting them, Parker transforms their significance along with their fate.

‘My work is consistently unstable, in flux, leant against a wall, hovering, or so fragile it might collapse. Perhaps that is what I feel about my own relationship with the world.’

Parker may be asking us to think, not just about the items themselves, but about the people who invest these things with meaning; about individuals and their relationships with each other; about the darkness on the edge of town.

'Violence is part of everybody's life, whether you like, or express it, or not. My work utilises all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I'd rather it be out than in.’

An Oliver Twist doll has been chopped in two by the guillotine that decapitated Marie Antoinette. A bullet has been melted down and spun into a fine thread. The poison of a rattlesnake is intermingled with its antidote and black and white ink to form Rorschach blots.

'Beauty is too easy. Often in my work I take beautiful objects and do extreme things to them, so that they are overlaid with something a bit more sinister and violent.’

Parker wrapped Auguste Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ in a mile of string. 

‘It became a piece about the complications of relationships - the strings that bind you together can also smother you.’

Parker’s most famous work is perhaps ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View.’ She took an ordinary garden shed – ‘the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away’ - and used Semtex to blow it up with all its contents. She then suspended the debris in mid-air. There’s a torch, a trowel and various other tools; pots, planks and pitchforks; a bike, a book and a broom – all shattered, shredded and scattered; frozen in time, as if the shed ‘was re-exploding, or perhaps coming back together again.’

'I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become clichés… and I give them a more incandescent future.’

In a recent interview (RA Magazine) Parker threw light on her shed piece by using a term coined by social anthropologist JG Frazer: ‘sympathetic magic.’ In Pagan rites and rituals actions were performed on representative objects in order to affect future outcomes. They would, for example, make an animal sacrifice in order to ensure a good harvest, shedding blood so as to protect lives.

‘You mimic the thing you are most afraid of, thereby warding off the imminent danger.’

Perhaps by focusing on our doubts, fears and frustrations; by reconfiguring the objects that represent our complacency, errors and anxieties, we can address our past and change our future; we can cast out demons. Perhaps we have a choice.

We usually encounter the concept of creative destruction in a business context. It is a wearily familiar phrase uttered enthusiastically by our tech overlords. It tends to come hand-in-hand with a wanton disregard for jobs, communities and social impact. I found Parker’s articulation of the idea far more compelling.

'A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.’

'Everything must change.
Nothing remains the same.
Everyone must change.
No one and nothing remains the same.
Young becomes old.
Oh, mysteries do unfold.
'Cause that's the way of time.
Nothing and no one remains the same.
There is so little in life you can be sure of,
Except the rain comes from the clouds,
Sunlight from the sky,
And hummingbirds do fly.’
Nina Simone, ‘Everything must Change’ (I Benard)

No. 377