In a recent Guardian article on Cornelia Parker the artist explains how her understanding and approach to sculpture perhaps goes against the historical understanding because:
[my work] is constantly unstable, in flux; leant against a wall, hovering, or so fragile it might collapse. Perhaps that’s what I feel, about my own relationship to the world. It is a universal condition, that of vulnerability. We don’t have solid, fixed lives; we’re consistently dealing with what life throws at us.
Certainly if you take a work like the recent Pavement Cracks (City of London) or 1991’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View it does not have the ‘weight’ or rootedness of a renaissance marble, a Henry Moore reclining figure, a Caro steel form, or a Chillida homage. We might though think of the immensity of a Serra work and see the vulnerability of its pose – its instability.
It is the link that Parker draws between her forming as a human and the work she makes that perhaps interests me most. I can’t quite work out where her work leaves me though. There are more than hints of the rhizome in what she says, and of Keatsian negative capability yet her work is seeming to make order and pattern out of the chaos. Looking at it another way, by freezing these items (as she often does through suspension) maybe she leaves us (and herself) hanging too and so in a state of vulnerability yet also one of potential. By increasing our vulnerability do we increase our potential?
Two Years at Margaret Street 