No. 1 Royal Crescent announces new 'Cornelia Parker & Historic Glass' exhibition for 2026

On 7 February 2026, No.1 Royal Crescent will present Handle with Care: Cornelia Parker & Historic Glass, an exhibition that will look through the eyes of one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker, at the historic glass and found objects that inspire her work and artistic process.

This exhibition will juxtapose Cornelia Parker’s series One Day This Glass Will Break (2015); Thirty Pieces of Silver (exposed) (2015); Fox Talbot’s Articles of Glass (2017) and Through a Glass Darkly (2020) with Georgian historic glass. The show explores Parker’s enduring fascination with the histories of objects and materials by pairing her photogravures of light and shadow cast by glassware with the historic artefacts that inspired them. This dialogue invites visitors to consider how these familiar forms, as Parker notes, “descend from their shelves and create new compositions” within her prints. 

Image: Fox Talbot's Articles of Glass 

Inspired by 19th century photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot’s ground-breaking photographs and photogravure technique, Parker has created a hybrid technique by placing actual glassware onto an etching plate treated with a light sensitive emulsion, which captures the objects’ shadows when exposed to ultraviolet light. In doing so she transforms the once familiar items into something very unfamiliar. This process is part of Parker’s career-long fascination with taking the recognisable, and pushing it to a point of abstraction. This slow, contemplative method of printing creates an effect on some of the monochrome prints that is almost painterly, as items blur in and out of focus.

The exhibition will display photogravure etchings from Parker’s Fox Talbot’s Articles of Glass, 2017 series, which depict the original glassware owned by Talbot, who lived locally in Lacock, Wiltshire and often visited Bath. Parker’s monochrome and mysterious images will surround numerous rare examples of historic Georgian glass from the collections of No.1 Royal Crescent, The Victoria Art Gallery and the Holburne Museum, domestic objects intrinsically linked to its owners and manufacturers and Bath’s local history.

Patrizia Ribul, Director of Museums at Bath Preservation Trust, which operates No.1 Royal Crescent, said: “We are thrilled to bring Cornelia Parker’s vivid metamorphic art to Bath. By showing Cornelia Parker’s work alongside local Georgian glassware, we can trace a story that runs from the everyday life of Georgian Bath’s residents, through the pioneering experiments of Fox Talbot, to Parker’s inventive and extraordinary reinterpretations today.

“The new Cornelia Parker exhibition is the latest in a series of captivating exhibitions, each blending historic and contemporary elements. Handle with Care will carry forward this tradition of linking past and present - though refracted through Parker’s striking and imaginative methods.” 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme including talks on photography and its process, decorative art, family activities during school holidays, and workshops with local makers.

Tickets to Handle with Care: Cornelia Parker & Historic Glass will be available on the No.1 Royal Crescent website in due course.