Picking up the pieces

The art arrives in hundreds of charred pieces, some so delicate they crumble at the slightest touch. Cornelia Parker isn't worried.

"Let the fun begin," the lanky artist says after slipping on a ragged blue jumpsuit and a pair of latex gloves.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Parker stands in a bare upstairs gallery at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. She arrived from London to assemble "Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson)," an installation that is one of the first works picked for the ICA's permanent collection.

"I never make art in the studio," says Parker. "I make it in the space. That way, you have to make very good, quick decisions. You can't prevaricate. You just have to get on with it."

A day earlier, ICA installers got started. They took the wood chunks -- some pieces as large as a billy club, others as small as a cork -- out of crates and laid them in orderly arrangements on the floor of a neighboring gallery space.

Now, the hard work. Parker has installed "Hanging Fire" a handful of times, including once at the old ICA building on Boylston Street. But it has been six years since Parker last put the piece together. To guide her, she uses a two-page cheat sheet outlining how to turn the seemingly disparate pieces into a unified work. Parker also consults a photograph showing "Hanging Fire" when assembled.

Much of Wednesday morning is spent deciding in which corner of the gallery to install the piece. On one side, the ICA's ventilation system blows out too much air. On the other, a ceiling sprinkler is in the way. By late morning, Parker settles on a spot just a few inches from the sprinkler.

Parker springs from a tradition of British artists such as Richard Long, famous for making art out of objects he finds in the landscape. She's also inspired by the pranks of Marcel Duchamp; at the Tate Britain, Parker once wrapped Rodin's "The Kiss" in a mile of string.

And "Hanging Fire" is just the kind of oversize work that installation artists love to make, but that couldn't be a permanent part of the old ICA. There simply wasn't enough room to display a collection and have temporary shows, too.

Parker often takes damaged objects -- silver plates crushed by a steamroller, a garden shed blown into pieces -- and re assembles them. "Hanging Fire" is made up of wood burned in a suspicious fire in London . When the piece was shown at the ICA in 2000, it helped put Parker on the map.

"It's sort of to do with fear," says Parker. "There's a lot of violence in the world, we're surrounded by potential catastrophe all the time. And somehow making calm installations about destructions, it sort of calms my fears."

She also believes art should not be too precious.

That's good. On Wednesday, a construction worker walks through the gallery space. He stops by a pile of charred wood and bends to pick up a chunk the size of a quarter. The man then runs it between his thumb and forefinger, as if he's found a shiny rock at the beach. Done, he carelessly chucks the wood back to the ground.

Janet Moore, the ICA's assistant registrar, catches the tail end of this episode and stares in disbelief.

She promptly calls the project's construction manager upstairs to lodge a complaint.

"That won't happen again," Moore says.

The remainder of Wednesday afternoon is spent stringing up the wood pieces.

Parker does this with a pair of ICA installers -- local artists hired as freelancers. The trio attach the wood to 12-foot strands of wire and string. They work together, with Parker kneeling alongside on the dusty floor. There's very little instruction; the task is tedious, and self-explanatory.

The three push pins into the soft wood of the small chunks. They string up the larger pieces by wrapping the string around nails that were hammered into the pieces. Late in the day, they are ready to start hanging the charcoal strands on a square rack that's been placed just below the ceiling.

That work takes place most of Thursday.

By now, the freelance installers have moved on to other tasks in the building. Parker and Darren Foote, the ICA's assistant preparator, develop an almost silent rhythm. They walk each strand from the next room into the gallery. Foote climbs aboard a mechanized lift, and, after being handed the string, raises the platform until he can hang that strand on the rack.

"It's tedious, but not difficult," says Foote. "The hardest part is the composition, getting it to look right."

Parker came up with the notion for "Hanging Fire" in 1999. She spent weeks searching for the right case of arson -- the materials left over had to work with her concept -- keeping in contact with the police near her home in London. Several promising blazes proved fruitless when Parker found buildings full of brick or metal, which she didn't want to work with. Then Parker learned about a suspicious fire on the outskirts of London. It was a woodshop. The smoldering remains were perfect.

Over four days, Parker hauled the wood home in her Volvo station wagon. In the spring of 2000, she installed the work at the ICA.

That's where wealthy collector Barbara Lee, an ICA trustee, saw "Hanging Fire." Normally, Parker wouldn't sell a major installation to an individual. She had been unhappy with the way Charles Saatchi, the British collector, displayed one of her pieces when he decided to sell it years ago.

But Lee assured Parker's agent that she planned to donate "Hanging Fire" to the ICA for its new building, even if it was still in the planning stages.

For the ICA, the piece makes perfect sense. Parker, 50, was a finalist for Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 1997. "Hanging Fire" was part of her first solo museum show in the United States at the ICA in 2000.

After that show closed, the piece, packed into a dozen cardboard boxes, sat inside a crate in a storage warehouse outside Boston, waiting for the new ICA.

Within a day of being unpacked for the first time in six years, it has nearly been resurrected. Almost half the strings hang from the ceiling. By Friday, Parker felt comfortable taking a leisurely lunch.

To an outsider, "Hanging Fire" looks finished. The suspended charcoals create a dramatic effect, as if a campfire has been painstakingly dissected and then recreated by an obsessive-compulsive physicist. When the back walls behind the piece are lit, the effect should simulate a bonfire, only with black shards suspended and separated in the a ir.

"Almost there," Parker says a little after 2 p.m.

But is she? For almost three hours, Parker paces and pauses, arms crossed, staring. She unpins a piece of wood here, adds a larger slab there. The latex gloves are off, her hands dirty with soot. The plastic sheet under the installation is littered with chunks of wood, like presents under a Christmas tree.

"It's not rocket science," the artist says. "It just takes an eye."

Finally, at 4:16, two days after she began, Parker stops staring at the piece and looks down. She is done. Not that anybody can tell. There's no celebration, or even acknowledgment. Parker simply bends down and starts to tug at the plastic sheet on the floor. It is time, she tells Foote, to start cleaning up.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.