“An explosion in action” is how Phoebe Eclair-Powell describes this, her 2019 Bruntwood Prize-winning work (production delayed by Covid). The inspiration for the piece, she says, in a note to the text, was Cornelia Parker’s 1991 artwork Cold Dark Matter: Exploded View.
Installation and the performance both feature a wooden garden shed. Parker blew hers up, photographed it as it exploded and then suspended fragments of shed and contents, as if in mid-event. By contrast, in Eclair-Powell’s work a character constructs a shed in the course of the action, which opens and closes with an offstage act of explosive violence. Most of the fragmented events presented, in the course of the following 50-plus scenes, are not a result of this act but form the lead-up to it.
