CORNELIA PARKER

TATE BRITAIN

Until October 16

As crowd-pulling spectacles, Cornelia Parker’s celebrated room-sized suspended installations will guarantee the popularity of this major retrospective. The big hits are all there: as well as her extraordinary ‘exploded shed’ from 1991, visitors can see the steamrollered silverware of Thirty Pieces of Silver and the similarly flattened brass band instruments of Breathless. But this enthralling survey of a 40-year career reminds us that there is so much more to enjoy. 

Cornelia Parker
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991. Tate 
Photo © Rowena Easton

‘Enjoy’ being the apposite word, because Parker’s playful sense of humour is the thread that connects room-upon-room filled with sculptures, films, prints, drawings and photographs. The Oliver Twist doll sliced in two by the very guillotine used on Marie Antoinette – a grotesquely gape-mouthed and winking magician’s assistant – was a laugh-out-loud moment.

That’s not to say she isn’t deadly serious. The imaginative way Parker probes the overlooked aspects of our material world poses profound questions with subtle poetry. Her Sculptural Negatives – a tiny pile of shimmering silver scrapings saved from the inscription engraver’s workbench, or the inky coils of lacquer gouged from vinyl discs – speak the unspoken and fill the air with the unheard. Another large suspended work, a delicate bronze tracery – like the leading from a church window missing its stained glass – hovers inches from the ground. It turns out to be cast from the cracks between paving stones in Bunhill Fields, the former Nonconformist burial ground where William Blake and Daniel Defoe lie. 

And Parker isn’t shy about putting politics front and centre either. Later work includes films of Trump supporters, eerie drone footage of a deserted House of Commons, and a mesmerising view of a Remembrance Day poppy production line. One of the final rooms houses the 1.5-metre wide and 13-metre long Magna Carta (An Embroidery), made to mark the document’s 800th anniversary. For this communal, polyphonic act of representation, the artist invited 200 people – including prisoners, lawyers and politicians – to hand-stitch the complete text and images of its English Wikipedia entry. 

Everyday objects, other people, historic moments… you’ll never look at anything in quite the same way again.