Tate Britain, London
This fabulous survey of her 40-year career has everything from soiled hankies to exploding sheds, as well as a vampire-like Margaret Thatcher – confirming Parker’s genius for finding poetry in the world around us
Filled with room-sized set-piece sculptures and installations, and with artworks so seemingly ephemeral, incidental and accidental – soiled handkerchiefs, piles of rust, a dented teapot – we would barely know what we were looking at unless Cornelia Parker told us. A survey of her 40-year career is full of delights and bomb damage, delicacy and violences, wry political comments and commemorations. It is also an art of collaborations – not least in a giant embroidery of the Wikipedia entry on the Magna Carta, whose lettering has been sewn by prisoners and professional embroiderers, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger among them.
There are black-and-white photographs of clouds above London’s Imperial War Museum, shot with a camera that once belonged to Auschwitz commandant and amateur snapper Rudolf Höss. Rorschach-blot drawings made from ink derived from snake venom and its antidote, and further blot drawings made from porno-tapes confiscated by HM Revenue & Customs, cut up and turned into pigment. The things you see in the photos and the blots depend entirely on what the artist tells us, and what you expect to find there. The clouds (shot with infra-red film) look creepy and lowering. The blots, by turns, reveal snakeskin textures and intimate body parts. The associations are everything.
