Cornelia PARKER Anything you want
Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums.
Her large-scale artwork War Room (2015) will be one inclusion at the MCA. It’s a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, red fabric memorial poppies conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs; it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict.
Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her (2008), which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation (1991) comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents.
