Bullet Drawing

The idea for Cornelia Parker’s wire drawings came when she took down her hanging sculptures and the tangled wires became like a dynamic three-dimensional line drawing. Beyond the materiality of the wire, she is interested in the meaning that it could hold: ‘Wondering how you could imbue a piece of wire with a narrative, a history, with monumentality’. [1]

She became interested in how metal objects can be transformed into wire and hold the memory of their former structure. In the series of works known as her Bullet Drawings, Parker has bullets melted down by a silversmith and drawn out into wire:

The bullet is perhaps the most romanticized means of death, a state that is therefore implicit within this object.

The Bullet Drawings (part of an ongoing hail) are made from various different types of bullets that have been melted down together and drawn into lead wire. Through the process of being drawn (and by default, disarmed), the bullets have been made into their own possible trajectories. [2]

Much of Parker’s practice assesses the violence of war, and diffuses it, for example in the neutralising of bullets. As artist and curator Mary Griffiths writes, ‘Cornelia Parker’s only weapon is her art, and much of her time as an artist over the past thirty-five years has been spent addressing, and negating, violence’. [3]

Parker relates the grid of her bullet drawings to the abstraction of Minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. But the material nature of her work subverts this: ‘confounding their abstract appearance is the fact that they are, by the very nature of their material, ‘loaded’. [4]

Read More