Cornelia Parker interviewed in March 1999

Interview with Kay Roberts March 13 1999 (in her studio Liverpool Street)

Filmed by Deborah May as part of the yoyo project.

Cornelia Parker Interviewed by Kay Roberts in 1999 (Excerpt)

Kay Roberts: Where did you spend your childhood?

Cornelia Parker: I spent my childhood in Cheshire, rural – deep rural Cheshire. I was brought up onn a small holding in the middle of nowhere, really. Not even in a village but in the middle of the countryside. It was like many generations of peasant farming, it belonged to the Duchy of Lancaster, the Queen’s Estate. My father was born there, and his father was born there. We had a few cows and a few pigs and a bit of land my father farmed to grow vegetables. So, I spent my childhood there, working very physically on the land, because there was a lot of work to be done – you know – like planting tomatoes, milking cows by hand, planting seeds, tilling the land. So, it was a very outside childhood.

Roberts: When did you start making art?

Parker: I think I started …. I was good at art at school, primary school, and when I went to grammar school that seemed to be my best subject, that, and English. I didn’t really think about becoming an artist until I was about 15, when it became apparent that was the thing I enjoyed the most, and I was dropping out of French class and doing extra art.

I remember going on a school trip to London when I was 15 with my two art teachers, which was fantastic, and actually seeing a lot of work for the first time in museums, first hand. And I thought, this is quite be good, could be good, maybe I’d like to exhibit at the Tate one day. So, I sort of took it upon myself for the first time, I’d always wanted to be a vet or a farmer or do something to do with rural pursuits. Suddenly having a glimpse of London and metropolitan life, perhaps, I thought this activity could be a really interesting one. So, I think that at the age of 15 I decided art would be the career, and then I went to art school. I think I was the first person from grammar school to go to art school rather than go into teaching or do art history. Very disapproved of, art was a very lowly subject to be pursuing.

Roberts: A question about the small holding and its importance.

Parker: I think when I was at home in my childhood, everyday physically, I’d come home from school, there wasn’t much time to do homework, so I’d go out and muck out the pigs, or string up a few thousand tomato plants. I think it’s actually not very glamourous, some people think that living in a small holding in the country must be a pleasant thing, but it was hard work. But I think I enjoyed the not thinking, doing things with my hands after being at school all day. There’s something very visceral about it as well. Helping my father de-horn cows. My school uniform would get covered in dirt. I was always on of those people who went to school with dirty hands because I’d been working with my hands. And there was the fact it was an isolated place and there were no other children around, so you spent a lot of your time inside your head, being in a rural situation, so there was some kind of link between the hands and this secret reverie that you might have, when you were up a tree or out in the fields.

Roberts: How do you describe the physical and the conceptual in your work?

Parker: I think my work is bound up with the physical as well as the conceptual and these two things are very important to me. And sometimes the result, my large work is very physical, but the smaller pieces are very interior, and I think this was echoed a lot in my childhood, having big chunks on my own. I’d be having these fantasies and ideas, then during the day I’d be doing this physical activity. And I think that later, when I started making art, it came out of an intuitive physical process to start with, then ideas began to flow, and sometimes the ideas would take over. Then I’d start with an idea and work back to the physical, so there was a yo-yo between these two things.

So, I don’t’ know, I think both these things are important to me. And sometimes, more recently, I was thinking I was getting far too much inside my head. I really want to get back to being more physical, getting back to just raw materials.

Roberts: What part does reverie have in the making of your work (as per Gaston Bachelard)?

Parker: The audience that look at the work ….. what I want more than anything for myself from the work, is space, mental space, somewhere for me to inhabit. Some what, that’s what I am looking for in other people’s art. That I’m finding a way, I want to enter it, I want it to be porous, so I can find a space for myself. If it’s all filled up, if it’s all too neat somehow, that keeps me outside the work. So what I’m trying to do with my own work is not to film it up too much with my own agenda, to reveal something to me, to be a mystery, to remain open. That’s quite hard.

End of film exert.

Sometimes I carry ideas around in my head for a long time. It’s a bit like collecting materials. I might have bags of – you know – incinerated rugs or something I’ve got from Customs and Excise – and they sit in my studio for a long time, until I find a place to put or present them. The same with ideas. You collect them all the time. You might have them for 10 years before you act on them. But it is finding the right material or the right situation for it to be, without it being a closed thing. So, what I’m trying to do is to provide catalysts for myself and hopefully the viewer. The work is a residue of a process and then hopefully the beginning of something else. So, it’s not closed off.

Roberts: How did you arrive at the idea of using the monument.

Parker: I was very drawn to the idea of the monument because when I was first making art I was trying to find my way through the thing between abstract and representation. For a long time, when I was at college, I was making purely abstract things. I was trying to make things that might trigger off associations but not be anything, not be anything recognisable. Of course, that’s quite hard to do. When I started making work outside college I decided to go, almost self-consciously, the other way. I thought – I’ll take the most obvious things that exist, things that are almost cliches, so overrepresented and ush them the other way.

So, I started using these famous monuments in my work, which were things I collected anyway, things I’d collected since childhood. These little architectural souvenirs that you’d get when you went to Paris

 Or New York. Sometimes they were places I’d visited, sometimes places that somebody had brought back a souvenir back from. Souvenirs, I’d decided, were the most, probably the most, popular form of sculpture in the home., The sort of thing you might have on the mantelpiece, that people understand as …… They are crude representations, but I like the fact they take you somewhere really famous, like St Paul’s Cathedral or the Empire State Building. You would reduce it to the crudest cypher, which is an architectural souvenir, and mass produce it, and sell it, and it’s a mass-produced monument. And I decided to take this monument, that’s almost been worn away by mass production and cast it myself. So, I crudely made casts of the Empire State Building and mass produced it from the same mould, so the mould would start to wear away. So, I got this blob, that was faintly reminiscent of the Empire State Building, but was going towards abstraction. And I continued with that, the idea of the monument, of wearing away the monument. It’s almost like the inverse of the monument sculpture. Throughout the centuries there was always this thing on the plinth, the thing you looked up to.  The heroic gesture, the bronze, you know, they had to be durable materials, stone. The sculpture I really loved were things like Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’, which were semi-formed things, or things that show the origin, or something that was returning to the origin.

I like the idea of the inverse of the monument being the unknown place, that because the monument is the most known thing, that the inverse of them might be the most unknown. Somehow we all know what these monuments are, we nominate things to be monuments, we nominate people to be monuments, and places. Beachy Head or the White Cliffs of Dover, sums up the British identity somehow. We need all these kinds of collections of monumental moments and monumental people and buildings and geography, somehow to map out lives out. These are things we chart our lives by. And somehow, by using them, because they are so familiar, to try and find out something that is completely unknown and indescribable, which is what I’m trying to do with the work. I’m trying to find something I don’t know about. But by using something very familiar, almost cliched, well-worn objects to find this abstract place. It somehow feels very secure because you have these landmarks that you know. It is trying to create a new space within that. The cliché somehow is where there is no space and perhaps the inverse of the cliche might be the place where there is the most space. It is a curious thing.

Roberts: Was the use of the ‘monument’ a productive time & why did the work evolve?

Parker: General works, I think ‘The Maybe’, which was my collaboration with Tilda Swinton. After using famous monuments for a long time – buildings – I transferred that to famous personalities. I was trying to build up almost an exquisite corpse out of famous personalities. Tilda herself was pretty famous, but in Art House movies, perhaps not to the general public as much as the intelligentsia, the art elite, in a way, from the various films she’s been in. ‘Orlando’ was the most popular and most mainstream of those films. So, people would be coming to see her in the flesh. And something about things in the flesh made me think about the idea of the relic, which stands in for the flesh somehow. I was brought up a Catholic, so idea of the relic, and things symbolic of other things – a piece of paper is symbolic of bread and then that is symbolic of the Body of Christ, and you ingest that.

So, I decided that I know what sort of thing I think of when I look at, say, a tiny thread of someone’s clothing, who was very famous in the past. You almost flesh out the person by seeing this tiny piece of them, or a piece of something associated with them. So, I decided I was going to take all these things that are so part of our language, like Victorian or Freudian, or Dickensian. And take relics from these people and place them in various glass cases surrounding Tilda. So that somehow, she represented the people who are living. Her life was not finished, our lives are not yet finished. Somehow that the piece was about our own mortality, not really about famous people at all. But somehow because we knew it was for a broad audience, they would know who these people were. I was trying to choose people who were household names, that people from other cultures might know and know their stories. They only needed the smallest catalyst to be able to fill in the gaps. And yet they were confronting their own mortality, and having someone who was living and breathing , with her discomfort and plight. Us looking at her, so the whole thing, hopefully, pointed to a more personal, emotional, state of mind, rather than the fame and monument.

So, in all the pieces I really hope, and I felt from the various people who saw it, hardened critics moved to tears, that it did touch an emotional core. When really what you were looking at was well worm museum objects but Tilda’s venerability and proximity ort of turned it’s head. That was a way of the monument pointing to the inverse of the monument and finding this place, which is an emotional core that is not about glib cliches and the well-worn phases we know. Somehow trying to find the underbelly of it.

Roberts: What defines the difference between ‘the monument’ and the ‘post monument’ in your work?

Parker: I think until you go out into the world and travel the world and experience it fully for yourself. As a child you look at it through encyclopaedias and through things written about it. I’ve always loved those kinds of books of facts. That tell you how many times you can fir St Pauls Cathedral into Everest. Ways of measuring the world, so you can grasp on it. Then I think that moving, becoming an adult, going into the world and trying to find objects in the world, that somehow could describe it. I moved later on after working with monuments into a point where, after working with matter, I was trying to find the anti-matter. I think that was what I was always trying to find with the inverse of the cliché, was this thing that you couldn’t even measure, that wasn’t even a thing.

So, I started a series of work called ‘Avoided Object’, which is carrying on, mostly on the small works, not the large scale works, even though they could be fitted into that category too. Trying to find objects before they became objects. Finding things like embryo firearms, which were pieces of metal from the Colt Firearms Factory, which were the very first lumps of metal they produced, before they produced before they produced the gun. Or trying to find something that was the refuse, on making an object. So, going to Abbey Road Studios and taking the grooves they’d cut out of the original lacquer disc, which would be the negative sound. Trying to find, for example I’ve just been working at the Science Museum, and I’ve made some drawings at the Royal Mint, where money is made. So, money pouring down these chutes at the factory. Newly minted, before they get worn by many hands, and having pieces of paper placed in the money chutes, so the money makes a drawing. So it’s almost like the unconscious of the money, or the money having, even before it goes into circulation, having some sort of trace.

So the ‘Avoided Object’ series are about things you avoid psychologically, things you don’t want to confront, or even don’t want to be an object. So avoiding the issue. These are the kind of things I’m trying to somehow make another exquisite corpse, to build up something that is a body, but is the opposite of the body, it’s the anti-matter. Like another thing from the Royal Mint that I got, the swarf that was made when you made medals, which was put in the Science Museum as ‘The Negative of Glory’. The inverse of glory, which is another monument. The things that we deify, and we say these things deserve medals. So it is just he refuse from that, the stuff that people want to throw away, that they don’t want. Everyone wants medals, but they don’t want the excess material; from that, the excess baggage. Yes, so after working with monuments for a long time, I’m trying to avoid the monument. I’m not sure of what that territory is about myself.

Roberts: Is there a difference between private & public personae in the use of installation or unique works?

Parker: Not sure. I think again, it’s Abbey Road and you think of The Beatles, you think of Oasis and you think of the songs you ever heard. Then there’s this other tiny coil of lacquer, which is the thing they take away to make the sound, is a non-object. They actually throw it away, it’s not important. So, all the Beatles records ever made, All these coils were thrown away, nobody would want them. I don’t know what is the negative of sound. What’s the inverse of Strawberry Fields? I’m just trying to mentally fill this gap. A gap, that place is a place you don’t normally try and inhabit. I don’t.