– MARINA WARNER –

a liminal openness, like a proverbial woman buried in a romantic novel, like a patient on the couch accessing the unconscious, or like the medium of wax before it takes shape and identity.

The artist Cornelia Parker has worked powerfully with things as links across time and space, with the connective tissue of former possessions, with nostalgic memorabilia, and has developed a new genre of visual pleasure that nevertheless casts Marie Tussaud as an unlikely foremother of contemporary art. In a memorable show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1995, Parker assembled objects with all kinds of direct associations, some quirky, some poignant, some absurdist (a strand of hair from Freud’s couch). But the centrepiece was called ‘The Maybe’, and it called the bluff of the waxwork effigy: here was a Sleeping Beauty – for real. The actress Tilda Swinton lay sleeping in a glass case all day, and we the visitors could watch her for as long as we liked. She wore ordinary day clothes, without adornment, without covers, with her spectacles by her side within reach. She moved, she breathed, she stirred, but she didn’t wake or get up, and she remained on the other side of the glass, out of our reach.16

This was a sight to provoke sighs of wonder and pleasure, truly. It recalled the secrecy and intimacy and peace of watching another sleep – a loved one, a child. It gave permission to do something in this case forbidden, to be close to a stranger who is a great beauty and

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