The weirdest misty morning - October weather in August - and here you can see what a dessicated brown mess the lawn has become after the drought. There are new green shoots - but they aren't grass, but wildflowers/weeds.
I headed off to the Tate to see the absolutely wonderful Cornelia Parker show - her lifelong concern with matter in various states of being: being deformed, mangled, destroyed; being on the way to being something else; being broken down and turned into ink or pigment; much repurposing - all of it slightly disconcerting (but not very disconcerting, other than the Oliver Twist doll cut in half by the guillotine that beheaded Marie Antionette). This was matter full of agency, or robbed of agency - like this extract from Thirty Pieces of Silver, which hung, just above the ground, masses of silver plate that had been crushed by a steamroller and then divided into thirty;
or what's probably her best known piece, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (actually a garden shed, full of stuff, blown apart by the Army School of Ammunition). She seems to have had a lifetime of initiative, asking people to do things, or give her things, which then become installations.
And then War Room - deep blood/Flanders poppies red, made out of countless sheets from which the Armistice poppies that are on sale every November here have been stamped, leaving - like dead soldiers - absences;
and possibly my favorite piece, Island - a greenhouse, painted with white brushstrokes of cliff chalk (she's made a lot of use of chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover), sitting on worn encaustic tiles that once lined the corridors in the Houses of Parliament, and lit by a bulb that pulses slowly on and off, like breathing, like a lighthouse, making everything unstable. And yes, of course, this is a post-Brexit work.
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