A thing about things

Cornelia Parker is obsessed with things: old things no-one wants any more, things salvaged from the dump, things unearthed in pawnshops, fleamarkets and dingy antique shops, things tarnished with a thick patina of accumulated history – things that have the ability to ‘make the hair on the back of your neck stand up’ with their sense of presence and past.

Throughout her talk, the joyous and groundbreaking exhortation of the American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams – ‘say it: no ideas but in things’ – hummed through my mind. Parker may be working on the other side of the pond, decades later, and in a different medium, but like Williams she is attuned to and tremendously excited by the power that can be exerted by an old cup, a ring, some scrumpled up newspaper.


This, though, is to misrepresent Parker a little bit. When things are around her, they often don’t stay things in their pure state for long: she likes to tamper with them, add things to them, or insinuate them into places they shouldn’t really be. She enthuses about having bought a piece of the moon and lobbing it into a pond, and talks with a mischievous glint in her eyes about an attempt – vetoed by a combination of authorities – to smuggle a piece of Emily Bronte’s hair into that of Nelson’s on his column.

She seems to delight in visual – and verbal – tricks and puns of the kind that are at once entertainingly silly and gracefully eloquent. I am particularly taken by her account of a work that involved throwing a lead mould of the work ‘gravity’ over a cliff, to see what effect ‘the thing itself’ would have on the human linguistic representation of it. Unsurprisingly, it reduced it to a garbled lump. Williams might well have been cowed by such a violent coalescence of idea and thing.

Parker’s work gleefully inhabits the varied uses of the word ‘thing’: at once used to refer to the specific and physical (the very thing), together with the vague and indefinable (something). This duality gives her plenty of room with which to play, and stops her work from either becoming restricted to the purely physical or lost in the tortuously theoretical. Interestingly, she distances herself from the ‘conceptual’ label, saying that she thinks of herself ‘as an intuitive rather than a conceptual artist.’ This is also underlined by the fluidity of her approach to ‘things’, repeatedly describing their capacity to accrue meaning, to mutate and change.

Her attitude to her own work is, refreshingly, by no means an exception – ‘once you’re done with it, it has a life of its own’ – she enjoys the fact that objects and images can take on extra significance after their making. For Parker, we are surrounded by stuff, and she ‘likes the idea somehow that stuff stands in for us’, taking continued inspiration from the transference of histories, thoughts and emotions that results from our everyday interactions with the things around us.