Cornelia Parker @ Ingleby Gallery

Cornelia Parker’s exhibition in the Ingleby Gallery forms part of the ambitious year-long programme of one-week exhibitions in celebration of the gallery’s tenth birthday. The stellar cast of the programme includes such world-renowned names as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rachel Whiteread and Howard Hodgkin, each vignette of a show containing two artists in a form of dialogue within the airy surrounds of the Calton Terrace gallery. The curatorial role has varied throughout the programme, with some of the selected artists choosing their dream exhibiting partner, and others leaving the choice open to the gallery’s curators. Parker falls into the latter category, with the Marcel Broodthaers' piece accompanying her work in the space having been chosen by the gallery as the perfect complement. Parker’s The Negative of Words, exhibited on a white column plinth, features a small pile of curls of silver contained within a perspex box. The silver is the residue collected from a silversmith’s hand-engraving of words, quite literally the titular negative of words. On the adjoining wall hangs Collected Death of Images, made around the same time. This work is a sheet of silver reclaimed from used photography chemicals, again the remnant of the act of creation effectively rendering itself the negative thereof. Broodthaers’ Project pour un text, La Pluie is a projection of a short film of the artist writing upon paper in pen and ink, his initially productive efforts increasingly frustrated by an ensuing shower of water falling upon head and page, washing away the freshly created text, rivulets of black disappearing over the table and ultimately leaving the paper blank. Broodthaers’ struggle to create is rendered ultimately futile, yet the existing remnant of the act lives on in the work projected upon the wall. These works are indeed perfectly complementary, the pared down show presenting one single vein from the practice of each artist in a pristine gallery, as the deceptively simple encapsulation of concept is mirrored in the brevity of the exhibition itself. With the year-long programme coming to an end it may be wise to make time for the last three shows.