Aspex Portsmouth

Week 20, Cornelia Parker, 40 Stories

Les Buckingham, Director 1984-99

A thousand pieces of silver plate, a steamroller, two miles of fuse wire, a dedicated team of students installing over two weeks directed by the artist. Three days spent polishing the silver by gallery assistant Betsy Orr, who today reaches her 90th year. It could not have been done without you B! The result was one of the most beautiful single artworks of the time by one of the UK’s greatest artists.

I had shown Cornelia before, selecting her Fleeting Monument, 1985, for a group show Surveying the Scene, 18 April – 18 May 1986. We had toured the south of England and visited her in her Reading studio. She was already beginning to defy gravity with these upside down Big Bens floating upwards to the plumb line. The piece is now in the Arts Council collection. When I saw her Thirty Pieces of Silver at the Ikon Gallery in 1988 I knew that it was not only a great work but also that it had to have a second showing. The lower floor of the Ikon at the time had a low ceiling. When I told Cornelia that the Aspex was 18 feet to the lighting grid and had an envelope of space above she jumped at the chance to show it in Portsmouth. A modern parable, the clue is in the title. Collecting objects made of silver plate over many years (domestic utensils, instruments, trophies) the artist talks about their worldly, material worth and then their real value. She had them crushed by a steamroller so as to give them all the same material status and makes them hover so that we have to view them anew. The shimmering pools and ethereal threads suspending the objects show us the true value of materials, not monetary but spiritual and transformational.

The impact of this sculpture at Aspex was profound. The British Art Show selection panel visited the show and selected it for the Hayward Gallery the following year.  It was duly bought for the nation by the Tate Gallery in 1998 and displayed there in the 2000s. I’m biased of course but the only time the audience has ever been able to walk through the sculpture was at Aspex and it has never looked so beautiful as it did at the gallery in 1989.