Cornelia Parker - a Little Less Conversation? at Tate Britain (until 16th October 2022)

Cornelia Parker's art is beautiful, wonderous, mysterious, intriguing. It's also annoyingly and intrusively over-explained. There are plenty of exhibitions where you leave feeling it would have been better not to read the captions, but that's usually because of preachy, pretentious curation. Here the artist herself is the annoying voice in the room which simply refuses to let you just look. The process - both mental and physical - is clearly important to her, but is it, should it be, more important than the finished work? She seems determined to cut out the crucial third figure in the triangle - the viewer - who is given so little room to look, interpret and engage that the works themselves are somehow lessened and deadened. 

A series of beautiful geometries of folded paper burnt with a poker are lengthily, exhaustingly linked to the Turin Shroud and the death of Edward II. A brief, well-thought title could have suggested the same ideas without labouring the point. As it is the works' elegant fragility, which resonates in so many ways from a memento mori, to burning books, to Mondrianic abstractions, is strait-jacketed and you feel almost guilty for not toeing the artist's line of thought. Sawn-up Sawn-off Shot Gun (2015) speaks for itself - we don't need to know that the artist contacted the police to acquire it and that it was actually used in violent crime. Even the meticulously long-winded description of blowing up and reconstituting the garden shed in Cold Hard Matter: An Exploded View (1991) seems superfluous: the installation, with the detritus of suburban banality suspended in splendid bare-bulbed illumination is more than enough. Instead, the precise recorded factuality of it starts to eat way at visual impact - the toy trains and wellies become too obvious, too considered.

Parker sometimes gets carried away with her own ideas. Island (2022), a greenhouse, daubed in chalk from the cliffs of Dover, standing on tiles from the Houses of Parliament, lit by a pulsating bulb, piles too many disparate ideas into the frame. The painted glass itself is enough, visually effective, thought provoking: the greenhouse is as evocative of Little England as the garden shed. Her best pieces are simpler. The flesh-like tent of Remembrance poppy off-cuts, the flattened brass instruments throwing mournful shadows on the walls in Perpetual Canon (2004): these are the visual memories that you take away from the show. 

At her best Cornelia Parker is an alchemist, creating from destruction; representing the cracks, the negatives, the spaces through which life has fallen. At her best she captivates, silencing you with a shadow, a breath of movement. At her best, there's no need for words.