Brilliant Ideas: Sculptor and Artist Cornelia Parker

• 00:00Brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before. It's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right. Brilliant ideas. Looks at the artists at the heart of this artist with a unique power to astonish thrill challenge provoke and shock push boundaries ask new questions and see the world afresh. Artists like Cornelia Parker is art itself has allowed me to explore my unconscious. And that's been a lifesaver really . There is something genuinely poetic about what she does and she's she has a sense of drama and theater. Koonin here I think is a quite rare artist. She has an incredibly delicate tops to her work. And yet underlying that there are incredibly strong powerful messages I remember seeing her work. Twenty four years ago now and it completely shifted my own sense of what art could be. And I think that represents how lots of people feel about Cornelia's practice British born Cornelia Parker has established a reputation as one of the most inventive and quietly provocative artists of her generation originally trained as a sculptor. Over the past 30 years she's developed a broad and eclectic repertoire of work spanning photography performance installation and sculpture she's never banging the drum loudly. She's sort of planting a quiet whisper in your ear and letting an idea flourish and develop on its own . Renowned for her collaborations with powerful institutions like the police and the military. Her work asked probing questions about the nature of rules and the structures that govern us . Park is currently working on a new piece for the British Library to mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta and her interpretation of this world famous charter promises to challenge and provoke seemingly most sort of benign thing. Can I no be provocative so I don't mind if there's a bit of aggro around it I think that the work I'm most well-known for is my exploded shed. This title is cold dark matter which I made in 1991 . I asked the British Army to blow up a garden shed for me this is part of this still ongoing series of violent acts. You know that I put my my found objects through but I just felt the explosion of something it wasn't necessary dealt with that much in art. Mehdi it's an aging explosion. Not like that you know that if know the tape still has that piece in a hundred years time it will . It will be a split second captured I love cold dark matter partly because it's the most stunning installation when you see it but I was there when the shed was blown up. I was a young journalist. You were lying behind sandbags as this shed and its contents were blown up. So there's a narrative drama when she works on a large scale I think she's very very impressive I wanted to somehow subject domestic life to this violence and so I couldn't blow up a house I couldn't blow up an attic. But the garden shed was the nearest thing I could get to being this safe harbor as it were and its reservoir of stuff you don't want to throw away. So it's like a kind of universal baggage container I don't know what it's going to look like and I thought it might just be this very dark thing. It was a tiny bit of light coming out of it but it wasn't. And those things happen all the time that that through the making. It does what it wants to do . I borrowed row downs the kids as it's a found object goes into it. And so I was very cheeky 2003. This is my naughty side coming. I was asked by the tape to be in this tree and all that they were doing and so I asked him if I could borrow of the kiss to make an intervention with it as an object and what I did was combine it was a mile of string a big ball of string which I wound around the lovers it's a kind of not quite bondage but it was it was it was suffocating them . It was called the kids. It was called the distance. So. And then in brackets a case with string attach. So it's more about the complexity of relationships that things aren't as romantic as you think they are. You know the things that bind you together also can suffocate you and there's constraints there . But there's also sensuality there I was born in Cheshire in 1956 in rural Cheshire so my father was a small holder. My mother came from a middle class background my father's working class . So I spent my childhood working with him outside playing hedges you know mucking out the pigs milking cows if I wanted to play I'd have to go off and do it secretly . Have a run down the fields and you know I know it's quite a solitary childhood so it's been a long time in my imagination which I think you know that's where perhaps my love of art and freedom came from . I think perhaps later on in life I realize looking back on it that I'm still playing and I have given myself permission to spend my whole creatively I had this amazing trip to London when I was 15 with my art teachers. I wanted to do a level art and I went with the elite large group and it's the first time I actually went to museums and saw work foot firsthand. And it sort of it was incredible it blew me away. I thought well this is something I'd love to do. And it was it seemed to be on my grasp. Seeing I didn't have a cultural background and there was no museum going or you know looking at OP in my family but I thought well I really want to do this. You know it's the only thing that made sense to me . I guess gaze when I was a Wolverhampton which was quite a male college it was about 70 percent men. And sculpture wasn't really the female domain. In the mid 70s when I was in the first year I was doing painting but was a very bad painter. I remember being down these derelict houses playing around just making the Spencer installation. I didn't know at the time and felt for the first time that I was you know there was something really there to be explored. I'm thinking I'm trying to paint light coming in through a window. I really prefer that light coming in the window. I'd rather use the real window in the real light. And it was a kind of threshold I crossed and then after a while I showed some of the things the photographs of the things I've been doing in the houses to members of staff. It's well you you should be in sculpture. I moved into sculpture and then things really started to make more sense. And then I was flying in a way the next breakthrough for me was a found object. I decided to almost reverse everything I'd ever done before. You know that was a conscious decision at work over the 20 or 25 years that she's been making art has they changed and in some ways stayed incredibly consistent her themes are pretty consistent. This idea of recovering lost stories or creating new stories by colliding objects with one another. When you see her work you encounter it she starts to make you subtly but significantly changed the way you encounter the world. I like the idea of using things everybody knows to try and describe something you don't know something that's unfathomable I thought well I'm not going to be worried about whether things are a cliched or ubiquitous or you know you call make a sculpture out of a teaspoon. You can I that was very liberating . It's great. She's very interested in the underside of things and whether that's taking silver objects and looking at them both in their shiny silver state and in their tarnished blackened state so there's a deep seam I think a ready rich scene of storytelling in her work. She deals with mortality and the passing of time in very interesting ways. I think she deals with violence actually in a very subtle way. I mean she uses destructive processes and the notion of violence and violation and crime but it's not done appropriately. She just has this capacity to get under the skin of something Art been a great way of saying things I couldn't say for myself . I have also suffered from depression throughout my life which is something that I'm still managing. But I think you know those dark thoughts getting corporations to work. So there has got this destructive and and sometimes quite violent side of them . But then there's always peace at the end of it . I've got all these kind of themes that emerged over the last 30 years of practice and I don't worry about which one I do next . I'm always reinventing the wheel every time I make a piece of work which seems a bit of a crazy thing to do and that's why I think my work can take on such diverse forms. But it's it's what I need to do to feel free . I have a studio but I don't use it very much. It's more of a storage place. On the whole I've made most of my work from the kitchen table I have to almost convince myself I'm not working was referred back from my childhood when I was being forced to work. Well I didn't want say so. I'm I'm always collecting I'm always looking I'm taking photographs all the time. My iPhone is my sketchbook. I'm listening to conversations I'm collecting little gems of ideas. And these things sort of I absorb somehow unconsciously you know they're not you know I'm not worried about whether they make sense oh here we are. Stevens faces and church signs you'll see stains that look like Jesus they smell is nice oil stainless is Jesus this one's Brilliant. Actually this is Kit Kat we've if you can see the face of Jesus . This is one my favorite tortellini. It looks like Jesus I like to make work that can be easily read on one hand but it also could be it could pose a question. So it's a kind of question mark really. And I think that means it's still active . It still continues to do to accrue ideas more studio based artists you know who who power more particular furrow. You know I really admire. No I wish I could be like Rachel White read or Antony Gormley and have this very particular hope and practice but it's it's not something I can achieve. So I have to allow myself to be who I am which is a grass open minded person is gaze Cornelia Parker was recently chosen as the first artist to show in the newly revamped Whitworth gallery in Manchester England . The exhibition which opened in February features some of her most famous works as well as a series of new pieces created especially for the space. The war room is one of the new commissions new works that Cornelia has developed for this show. It was designed particularly to fit in to new Pavel sealing exhibition spaces and working with a leftover Poppy paper. The double layer of the leftovers of the rows and rows of red paper go through the machines and pop is stamped out we began making the exhibition and in 2014 opened in 2015. So we've been part of the whole wider cultural commemoration of the outbreak of the first world war but I think Cornelia's approach to that is all about how we as people approach loss . None of us are immortal and we're all going to die at some point . So it just seems like life damage death resurrection is part of what's been going on forever. Life is full of tragedy. You know we're bombarded with the news every day and it's usually bad things and so we have to absorb all this stuff for some people it's almost like a chapel. Very quiet behavior . A sense of contemplation. And it can be very upsetting so just like in human experience you can kind of grasp but not quite grasp the sense of the enormity of that loss. And I think that's what the piece is all about . I'm doing a big project about the Magna Carta which is an embroidered facsimile of the Wikipedia page of the Magna Carta . Snapshot taken on a into 99 birthday of the Magna Carta. And it's going to be 13 meter long hand embroidered facsimile. But spending a good bit of time on the wikipedia page knows just thinking of ideas and that's what it's all here. This is all this is where you know this is getting added to daily and somehow is how can you get all that contemporary response. The Magna Carta into a piece and the idea of Magna Carta being an embroidery you know embroidering the truth and it's one of those little flashes of intuition because everybody is using the Magna Carta for their own ends and defending it or undermining it depending on where they're coming from. So this is literally one of the sections as there's many many sections. This is part of the contents of the page. So this is all hand. And the colors are determined by what colors they are on the Internet. I love the reverse of it because it looks like another language you know it might well be Latin or Greek because it's written backwards. This is Latin subconscious part of the object really. And that's why I love it it's something as benign as an embroidery but it's also I think quite a political piece . The bulk of this piece has been made by 33 prisoners in 13 different jails. So they are mostly serving long long sentences so the in an embroidering long sentences because they're writing or this text and then there's about a fact invited 50 about 50 individuals from you know Q CS MP barons journalists commentators and activists campaigners people who somehow map out our society Julian Assange embroidering freedom might be very different from analyzer Manningham Buller X and my five embroidering the word freedom. So you get this beautifully embroidered object which has got some very bad embroidery in parts which is usually done by the QC or the barons because they don't embroider. Day in day out that the prisons do . I'm here at the Royal School of needlework in Hampton Court . All the pieces the Magna Carta have been done in different places have all come together and have all been stitched together. And now we're putting on the sidebar and hand stitching this kind of piece of piping all along the H which is mimicking the line that you see on the computer screen. This is a bit I can't do even though I did O level needlework my embroidery skills are pretty bad. Well what happens when he gets to join like to join. Will bring the two together and we'll what we call plunge through the fabric. Bring it underneath and then fix it on the back. So you can't see a John RTS. And I love this little picture over here. The Magna Carta which because it's been taken from the computer screen is quite abstract. So you see so this is reference to the real thing . That is a facsimile of of what you see in the British Library . But it's because it's just taken from the computer screen. It's just made a little abstract. Strokes I feel quite emotional when I say altogether. Actually I think it's hard when you look at it to understand the sheer amount of hours that's gone into it. But I think once it's all in place it will be quite magical really I think being an artist is quite a political act. I think it's like a philosopher. But you're not affiliated to one school of thought. You know you can be this free thinker and make rational you know things tangible really. And I like that very much that society does need artists. You know we are important and we have to have that as part of our culture because I feel so much more a lot of friends of mine have scientists saying oh you know you artists get away with murder. You could be heretic. Can say things that are rational and and not have to have peer review to back them up. I think a lot of her work does have a very strong political undertone if not overtone as a recent series that she made in about 2012 13 which was a series of abstract photographs of what looked like paintings . In fact it was the wall of a prison which was being redecorated an external wall of a prison. But she saw the lines and the grids as almost a reference to American Abstract art of the 1950s and 60s. Now there was something in that work about the state of imprisonment. You know the lines of the grid being almost a replica of the physical imprisonment of people in that environment. I don't think I'm a rebel or reactionary I just think I'm a human being who's trying to negotiate all the the kind of laws of the land and you know being a citizen and human nature is something that has all kinds of control of all sides and we are forced to control them. So we're always battling with this in nature. We all should be free radicals and we should all exercise that right really. And lots people can't be free radicals because they they have you know 9 to 5 jobs and all the rest of it. And it's sort of a real privilege to do that. So I'm doing it on their behalf in a way Cornelia has had a good strong reputation in the art world for a long time now. And I don't feel she's peaking I think. I think she'll get better and better with her the experience of making work and the increased opportunities that will now come her way. I think we'll see ever more interesting work from she has at the moment the most terrific mid career dynamism I think she has a sense of doing what she can as an artist to address the really critical challenges of our age. The fact that she can identify the power of objects for their everyday meaning but transmute them into something incredibly magical and different and wonderful is a big part of why she's going to last as one of the most important artists of her generation . Well suppose all my days. I have a tiny or massive and I've got all kinds of ideas I haven't yet realized But I'm. I mean I think I'm uncovering new new ideas as I go and sometimes those old ideas get left on a pile and they may or may not get dark . You know so I've had all kinds of ideas like having a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars rock on the moon. A good piece of have priest so proven by entropy on Mars. Who knows . So why do I never worry about what I'm going to be doing next week or in a year's time I haven't got a game plan for my work . I just hope my next you know I do my best work is yet to come . Tidjane Thiam brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor .

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