Chartwell Notes

In each work in Cornelia Parker’s Bullet Drawing series, the lead from a single bullet is melted down and drawn into wire, evoking the form of a dynamic line drawing. The dual meaning of “drawn” underscores its relationship to drawing practice, as does the connection between the lead of a bullet and that of a pencil.

These works, Parker explains, arose from her “wondering how you could imbue a piece of wire with a narrative, a history, with monumentality.” The resulting grid evokes art historian Rosalind Krauss’s famous description of the grid as emblematic of Modernist ambition. Yet the “loaded” nature of Parker’s material, with its connotations of violence, unsettles the work’s formal affinity with artists such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra — and, in a New Zealand context, Allan Maddox — further complicating the essential Minimalist tenet articulated by Frank Stella as “What you see is what you see.” With Cornelia Parker, it is often the processes of transformation you don’t see that are the most significant.