Ikon gallery, Birmingham

A typical urban-regeneration art gallery - white walls, bookshop, cafe in a converted school, with additions like a glass elevator up the side (complete with sound piece by Martin Creed, a scale being sung as you travel from floor to floor, great art-bit to come across accidentally!) and some original features (or are they too art-bits to come across accidentally?) like a set of simple little windows on the stairwell:
The show was Cornelia Parker, and photos were allowed for personal use if you signed a list on a clipboard. So I can't show the actual work, which really does gain from being personally experienced anyway. But while taking pix of some items under glass I was annoyed by the way there were always reflections - until the reflections overtook the work under glass and became my own reconstructions of the experience:
One of the works was some earth from under the leaning tower of Pisa, removed to stop the tower from leaning yet further, and suspended in a room. Just clods of earth...

Another consisted of chunks of metal drawn out into wire, looped and framed under glass: a silver dollar drawn into a wire as long as the statue of Liberty is high; a gold filling drawn out like thread (there was a golden needle too); something else drawn out to the height of Niagara Falls.
Also on show were her "Brontean Abstracts", made at Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontes. They included a sound recording of conversations with psychics in various rooms; electron micrographs of the sisters' hair; extreme closeups of unnoticed things like the holes in a pincushion or erasings in the margins of manuscripts. And - of interest to editors - photographs of places in the manuscript of Jane Eyre where one word had been crossed out to be replaced by another - could becomes would, natural becomes actual, glimpse becomes idea, soul becomes spirit.

How would you categorise Cornelia Parker, we wondered -- certainly not a painter, not a photogapher ... does she call herself a sculptor? Perhaps she's more of a conceptual artist. "Looking is a different kind of knowledge" she once said in interview.

Looking through a camera is a different kind of seeing - the next day, recording rediscovered bits of ancient wallpaper in the bathroom that is being renovated, I found this Parkeresque object, a drip of plaster from the ceiling, looking like a blow-up of a passing atomic particle -