Parker’s deliberate use of banal objects poses yet another challenge. She takes the very constituents with which we structure our lives, the supposedly safe certainties of house, garden shed, school, silver trophy, cathedral and coffin - and, by pushing these personal and public monuments in unexpected directions, destabilises our expectations of them, and therefore of ourselves. When a multitude of chalk strokes swarm over the walls of a school building (»Exhaled School«, 1990), sea-smoothed pebbles which were once bricks and mortar rear up into the shape of a home (»Neither From Nor Towards«, 1992) or the eroded miniature forms of our historical landmarks rear up like a termite’s nest (»Fleeting Monument«, 1985), nothing, it seems, can quite be trusted.
