Cornelia Parker is one of Britain’s best loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists. Always driven by curiosity, she reconfigures domestic objects to question our relationship with the world. Using transformation, playfulness and storytelling, she engages with important issues of our time, be it violence, ecology or human rights.

Tate Britain presents a new exhibition with many of her famous works just now. One of them is called Thirty Pieces of Silver.

 

 

This iconic piece was previously shown in York St Mary’s Church back in 1991, still astonishing today is it?

 

Copyright ©️ Shannon Tofts

 

The idea was from her childhood and the title was borrowed from the Bible. Thirty pieces of silver was the price of betrayal.

 

 

The exhibition also brings another powerful work Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View

 

 

Imagine your garden shed is blown up by a plastic explosive, for one millisecond if the time can freeze and you are free to move and witness, this might be what the explosion looks like. All the old toys, child bike, garden tools, clothes etc are torn to thousands of thousands of pieces. And it is just a small bomb. Now think about Ukrainian people currently under bombardment, how thrilling their lives are. Oddly enough, this exhibition connects the peacetime experimental artwork with a real war now on European soil.

The cold dark matter.

 

 

While you may find the darkness a bit heavy giving the current situation, and the living costs in the UK are so high this year comparing with last two years even in the pandemic, our human lives still need to carry on. There, the light-hearted display of a band of musical instruments, Perpetual Canon, is joyful to observe.

 

 

In the next room, a full Magna Carta wikipedia note is not printed, but presented in the form of amazing embroidery, as well as films and a wealth of innovative drawings, prints and photographs. Some works will spill out beyond the confines of the exhibition and infiltrate the permanent collection, in dialogue with the historical works they reference.

Following the exit sign to the store, I am instantly quite sure, this is another classic exhibition we will talk for a while. And it’s worth spending every minute of our precious lives.