There’s something innocuous about garden sheds – they offer refuge, a place of retreat from the pressures of everyday life. Their earthy smell and forgotten, dusty clutter provide a sort of consolation which Cornelia Parker’s work literally blows apart. To create it she commissioned the British army to dynamite a shed she’d filled with objects, junk really, collected from friends and family. These include a tricycle and a record player. The resulting jagged fragments have been suspended from the gallery ceiling around a light bulb to create an installation recently voted the favourite work of art in the Tate. Thus the piece we see is a reconstruction of a performance, a still record of a moment of terrifying violence.
The title is intriguing. ‘Exploded view’ puns on the kind of numbered, ordered and labelled diagrams made by engineers or which we use when constructing some fiendishly complex flat pack piece of furniture. In other words it’s the very opposite of the phenomenal, unthinkably powerful, primordial energies that created life on earth in the first place, as the ‘cold, dark matter’ was hurled out into space nanoseconds after the Big Bang. The sharp edged shards cast threatening shadows to enhance our sense of awe. It’s a witty, domesticated, even suburban representation of universal origins. How wonderful to feel so exhilarated while still being invited to smile.
