Cornelia Parker
Singles, 2024
Polymer Gravure etching on Madrid Litho 300gsm paper
Paper and image: 81.5 x 57.7 cm
Edition of 25
Sway, 2024
Polymer Gravure etching on Madrid Litho 300gsm paper
Paper and image: 81.6 x 57.6 cm
Edition of 25
Cornelia Parker (b.1956) was commissioned in 2011 to create Folkestone Mermaid, one of the town’s most popular artworks that is permanently sited on Sunny Sands, celebrating the local and the everyday.
Singles (2024) and Sway (2024) provide insight into Parker’s wider practice, whereby she transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. With these works, she uses printmaking to produce something elusive and ephemeral – a world of shot, liqueur, and spirit glasses in the first stages of emergence from a ghostly past. The pairing is like a before and after sequence. As the artist says, ‘Singles measure hours of enjoyment, celebration, digestion, and possibly inebriation. In Sway, inebriation seems much more likely, as swaying and blurred vision occur.’
To make these prints Parker uses the photogravure process. Inspired by nineteenth-century photography pioneer William Fox Talbots’ first photographic images, Parker uses the objects to cast shadows onto a chemically coated plate, exposing them to ultra-violet light, so that they act as a photographic positive. The ultraviolet light is cast, for varying lengths of time, at oblique angles over and through the objects. The photogravure process is part of Parker’s career-long fascination with taking the recognisable, and pushing it to a point of abstraction. This slow, contemplative method of printing creates an effect on some of the monochrome prints that is almost painterly, as items blur in and out of focus.
Courtesy Rachel Verghis and Spare Rib
Keppels
Biography
Cornelia Parker is renowned for her large-scale installations which push the boundaries of what art can be and how it might function in and impact on the world. The ideas of positive versus negative, and the compression of three-dimensional objects, explored in her sculptures and installations over the past twenty years, now permeate her printmaking, a medium that continues to offer new possibilities for the artist.
Her first major solo exhibition, Thirty Pieces of Silver, took place at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1988. Since then, she has gone on to exhibit all over the world. Upcoming and recent solo institutional exhibitions include City Gallery Wellington, Wellington (2026); Kindl, Berlin (2025); Eden Project, Cornwall (2024); and Tate Britain, London (2022). Parker's work is held in numerous collections worldwide including Tate, London; British Council, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundacio La Caixa, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.
A member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Parker was also appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022. She was the UK's official Election Artist for the 2017 general election and in 2023 was commissioned by the UK Government Art Collection to create works in response to the Coronation of King Charles III.