Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View is the restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist Cornelia Parker. The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls. In an interview with Tate curator Michaela Parkin, Parker suggested that an explosion was something she had wanted to do for a long time. To her, an explosion is an ‘archetypal’ image, familiar to us from childhood to adult life:
Somehow the idea and imminence of the ‘explosion’ in society seemed such an iconic thing. You were being constantly bombarded with its imagery, from the violence of the comic strip, through action films, in documentaries about Super Novas and the Big Bang, and least of all on the news in never ending reports of war.
Parker liked the idea of something that happened in a split second but that could also be made to have a durational aspect to it. As an MA student she had made a series of ‘wooden explosions’ – small models of explosions, which she then left outside to weather and disintegrate. The explosion to Parker was the latest in her series of orchestrated ‘clichéd cartoon deaths’. She had previously steam-rollered silver objects and had coins run over by a train.
WHY WAS IT MADE?
In an interview with Tate curator Michaela Parkin, Parker describes her idea of a shed:
"Where you store things you cannot quite throw away. Like the attic, it’s a place where toys, tools, outgrown clothes and records tend to congregate."
The mundanity and also refuge-like quality of the shed is important to the meaning of the work. By blowing it up, she is taking away the safe place, the place of secrets and fantasy, the place where a personal history of objects no longer in use – but not quite finished with – is stored. But she is also, in the process of creating an ‘exploded view’, perhaps creating a new space.
CHOOSING THE ‘RIGHT’ SHED
The shed used in Cold Dark Matter was a composite, constructed with wood from various old shade by a company in Suffolk. Parker told them what she wanted: an 8’ x 12’ (2.44m x 3.66m) shed with windows.
"I wanted it to be an archetypal shed because originally I was looking for a shed any old shed – I was going around all these allotments looking at sheds and they were all too romantic in a way …you know, if you blew up somebody’s specific shed it became too biographical, so I thought I’d get this kind of constructed shed."
"The objects that make up the installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, range from tools to childrens’ toys. Although some are Cornelia Parker’s own, and some have a personal significance (among the books is one called An Artist’s Dilemma), most of the objects were gathered over a three month period – from friends or from car boot sales."
Parker contacted the army to see if they would be prepared to help her, and to her surprise they were very co-operative. She was invited to the Army School of Ammunition where they demonstrated various types of explosives, and what these explosives could do, by blowing up a range of objects including a table and a car.
She decided on plastic explosives as providing ‘the archetypal explosion’ where things just get blown up without pyrotechnics or special effects. Major Doug Hewitt was the senior instructor at the training school at the time. He met Cornelia Parker and her team on a sunny afternoon on the terrace of the officers’ mess and she put her idea to him.
After the explosion the bits of shed and dispersed objects, twisted and blackened from the force of the explosives were carefully gathered together. Some objects were never found – either blown far away and missed or totally destroyed.
Cold Dark Matter is a three-dimensional artwork but works against some traditional ideas of sculpture. Whereas traditional sculpture is concerned with something solid, here the artist is fascinated by fragmentation and materials in a state of flux. The artist herself writes, ‘I’ve never made a solid sculpture; I am more interested in the space with and around the mass, in atmosphere’.
The exploded shed and its contents are suspended using transparent wire and are lit by a single light bulb at the centre of the installation. We can walk round and look through the work, discovering it element by element. The space between objects is an important part of the work and boundaries between the work and the viewer are blurred. The objects cast dramatic shadows on the gallery walls, adding another dimension to the piece and another level of meaning.
Discussion points
- Use the slideshow above to take a closer look at a selection of the exploded objects. Can you recognise what these objects (or bits of objects) are? Are they everyday objects or special objects?
- Look at the installation again. Are the objects arranged in any particular order?
- Why have the objects have been suspended in mid-air (the artist could have laid them on the floor or placed them in a glass case)?
- What the light source is? If it were lit differently, how would the work change?
- These objects have been selected by the artist and then subjected to a violent event. What has happened to the objects? How has the process changed them?
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