Cornelia Parker

Still Life with Reflection, 2004

Domestic silverware
West Wing, St Bartholomew’s Hospital

Cornelia Parker’s work has a sense of humour, but also a subtle spiritual quality that encourages the viewer to take a longer look. At Barts, Parker observes that the waiting room is, by its very nature, a limbo place where time and reality can feel suspended. On being asked to create an artwork for such a room with the potential of a captive audience, Parker felt the blank ceiling was the appropriate place for it to be located. As she explains, “The contemporary ceiling is usually a neglected empty space with no decoration, but further back in history, the ceiling was a popular site for art. In the lofty rooms of stately homes, eyes are taken upwards to enjoy the paintings or carvings that might adorn them. The artists who created them would often employ a technique known as trompe I’oeil, to trick the eye. Through the clever use of perspective, this would give an illusion of three dimensionality to what were in fact painted flat illusions or carved low relief’.

Parker was born in 1956 in Cheshire and educated at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and Reading University.

The award winning Barts Heath Breast Care Centre is considered a pioneering example of public art commissioning in a healthcare setting. A series of site specific commissions from leading artists are integrated with the architecture, to produce moments of contemplation; creating spaces that positively encourage distraction and discussion.

The art programme was curated for Vital Arts by Theresa Bergne of Field Art Projects, and took as its starting point the feedback that visitors would rather be ‘anywhere, but here.’ To this end, the expression of landscape explored by all the art installed offers an element of ‘transportation,’ offering viewers the opportunity to think about being ‘somewhere else,’ if only in mind.