Handle with Care: Cornelia Parker & Historic Glass at No.1 Royal Crescent
7 February 2026 – 10 May 2026
A new exhibition at No.1 Royal Crescent
7 February – 10 May 2026
The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath
No.1 Royal Crescent presents Handle with Care: Cornelia Parker & Historic Glass, an exhibition that looking through the eyes of one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker, at the historic glass and found objects that inspire her work and artistic process.
This exhibition will juxtapose Cornelia Parker’s series One Day This Glass Will Break (2015); Thirty Pieces of Silver (exposed) (2015); Fox Talbot’s Articles of Glass (2017) and Through a Glass Darkly (2020) with Georgian historic glass. The show explores Parker’s enduring fascination with the histories of objects and materials by pairing her photogravures of light and shadow cast by glassware with the historic artefacts that inspired them. This dialogue invites visitors to consider how these familiar forms, as Parker notes, “descend from their shelves and create new compositions” within her prints.
Inspired by 19th century photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot’s ground-breaking photographs and photogravure technique, Parker has created a hybrid technique by placing actual glassware onto an etching plate treated with a light sensitive emulsion, which captures the objects’ shadows when exposed to ultraviolet light. In doing so she transforms the once familiar items into something very unfamiliar. This process is part of Parker’s career-long fascination with taking the recognisable, and pushing it to a point of abstraction. This slow, contemplative method of printing creates an effect on some of the monochrome prints that is almost painterly, as items blur in and out of focus.
