It took Cornelia Parker four months to negotiate with the British House of Commons and then hundreds of “swoops” to complete her vision. There’s a story behind every work of art, and hers is a good one.
“I wanted to have a very different view, of a very familiar place,” she says.
That, she got.
First came the sound, whining through the void. And then, the menacing presence of a drone hovering into view over the empty benches of the House of Commons. Swooping and diving, casting eerie shadows and churning up the silence.
“The drone I really liked because it was such a malevolent presence,” she tells me. “We use it for surveillance, we use it to drop stuff into prisons. We use it in warfare.”
Cornelia Parker used her drone to turn politics into art.
She is standing in the Great Hall of Westminster with its massive and sweeping heritage. As Britain’s fifth “Official Election Artist”—and the first woman ever appointed—it is a spectacular setting for her work to be unveiled.
“It’s a very curious position,” she says. “It’s a very tough brief. I was told I had to be unbiased, that I had to cover all parties equally.”
She “covered” last year’s election campaign, essentially using her smartphone as a digital sketch pad. Months later, that came together as “Election Abstract,” a short video montage of images she uploaded to Instagram.
A second video, titled “Left, Right & Centre” (see below) offers a much darker interpretation of British politics.
“It summed up how I felt,” she says. ”And how a lot of people felt. That we’re in this very weird moment in history and the election didn’t seem to change anything.”
In Cornelia’s Parker’s words, the drone’s rotors stir up “winds of change,” scattering stacks of newspapers piled on a long polished table that dominates the Commons.
Right-wing newspapers on one-side, left-wing newspapers on the other, until they are all blown together in a messy turbulent metaphor for the election itself.
