Cornelia Parker interviewed

If you would like some insight on Cornelia Parker's art, you can read a fascinating interview with her in Sam Stone's blog.

You will remember that Cornelia Parker was the artist behind the recent exhbition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontëan Abstracts.

Find below some Brontë-related extracts from the interview, but we really encourage you to read the whole of it. You won't regret it.

For me as a stand-up comic, whenever I have an idea all I have to do is write it down and perform it, but you have to ask the army to blow things up or talk to NASA about sending a bit of meteorite back into space.

Most recently I've been trying to get the Greater London Arts Council and City Hall to let me put some hair from each of the Bronte sisters into the 'stone hair' of the newly restored Nelson's Column. The Brontes are iconic and have become part of a mythology and I've tried to find the underbelly of a cliché. I've been looking at the Brontes' split-ends under a microscope. Well actually, Anne and Emily have got them but I can't find any in Charlotte's.

Perhaps she was too fastidious.

Whereas Emily was quite wild and not known for keeping up her looks. I loved looking at these split ends. It's so human and poignant. So one of the things I wanted to do was impregnate this huge statue of Nelson with this feminine DNA. I felt I should give them a ride on Nelson's shoulders.

And are they going to let you give Nelson hair extensions?

Basically, no. The reason they gave was time constraints. I think it's more to do with these Bronte hairs, you know this female DNA, might bring down this hero.

Charlotte for one would love that idea. And it would be uniting the Duke of Brontë to the Brontë sisters. You know Patrick Brontë might or might not have changed his name in Nelson's honour.

So there is a little of the Anarchist in you?

Well, I suppose. The other thing I'm trying to do with the Bronte project is to get quite a famous Medium to come to the Bronte Museum and see if they can pick anything up. But this particular Medium hasn't said yes yet. I thought it would be great because Victorian novels are full of that sort of stuff and people believed it like it was a science.

A couple of psychics also visited the Parsonage last September when Brontëan Abstracts had just opened.

What are you doing tomorrow for your birthday?

I'm going to the British Library at 8:30am to photograph the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, which shows her 'crossings-out' and last minute changes like where she replaces the word 'purple' for 'crimson'. My favourite is where she's put 'would' and then crossed it out and put 'could' and then she's crossed that out and put 'should. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet but then I'm never quite sure what I'm going to do with these things until the last minute.

Which Brontëite wouldn't like that for their birthday? Whenever BrontëBlog is in London we always make a point of looking at the Jane Eyre manuscript at the British Library. There's no words to describe how great that is.

Do you ever feel that your inspiration is almost Divine?

Yeah definitely. The whole thing with Bronte and Nelson, for example. I was thinking that adding the Bronte hair to Nelson's stone hair was a bit like the principle of Homeopathy at work. You know, here is this Uber-male and then these romantic females get added and together you end up with this super-heroine. So I was on the phone trying to convince the Bronte Museum and the Arts Council and I was asking them to think of it like Homeopathy. I put the phone down and an ex-student called to commission me for some work for her garden. I don't really do stuff for the outdoors except I did once throw a piece of moonrock into a lake and put a sign that said 'at the bottom of this lake is a piece of the moon' and I was telling her about this and about how it was like Homeopathy because you're putting a piece of the real moon into something that reflects the moon. And she said, 'Oh that's fantastic because my husband is Nelson of Nelson's Homeopathic Remedies'. 'Oh Gosh,' I said. Anyway, I was talking about this anecdote at a Conference for the Uncanny a couple of weeks ago and I think mostly when you are immersed in the process of creativity, the more things crop up and these coincidences occur it's only because you are alert and you're on a trail and you don't know what you're going to end up with and it IS almost like an act of faith. I'm sure it is the same thing with comedy.

Fabulous interview.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions