Brilliant Ideas Episode #2:
Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker was raised on her parent’s farm in Cheshire in North West England, where she spent her childhood tending to livestock. Life in this rural setting felt drab and companionless to young Parker, who spent most of her time alone exploring the limits of her imagination. This however has become a crucial inspiration for her work as an artist. As she reflects on her life today, she notes that it is no different from her childhood when she would let her imagination run wild. To Parker, there is no virtue more important to artists than imagination and creativity. As an artist “[she] is still playing and [she] has given [herself] permission to spend [her] whole career doing it.”

Parker first set foot in a gallery on a school trip when she was 15. Since then, entranced by the power of art, she began her formal training and went on to study fine arts in college. Upon observing a ray of light shining through a window, she decided that canvases no longer suited her as a means of expression. Her interest shifted to three-dimensional expression, which prompted her to make the transition to sculptures and installation art. This preference for three-dimensional work can still be seen in her work today.

Parker approaches her art as a living, breathing organism. As an artist, she provides an overall direction, but the specifics of the form are left entirely up to the work itself. In short, an artwork can take on changes independent from the artist’s intentions. Parker relishes in the idea of such transformations that are wholly unpredictable and random.

Parker’s signature piece, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View creates a chilling, unsettling atmosphere one might experience while witnessing a detonation. This was also the installation that brought recognition and fame to Parker as one of England’s most influential contemporary artists. The piece is an assemblage of charred fragments from a garden shed that was deliberately blown up with the help of the British Army. Unrecognizable objects hover mid-air, while large shadows created by the light inside the installation fill the surrounding space. Parker explains that it was impossible to predict exactly what the explosion would do to the shed, or what kind of fragments would result from it. It was a creation of the object’s unconsciousness that insisted on “[doing] what it wants to do.” As a forgotten site that people frequent only to store memories alongside objects now obsolete but too precious to discard, to Parker the shed was a place that fully embodied the temporality of life. By bringing total destruction to this personal space crammed with secrets, Parker sought to highlight the temporal nature of life by drawing attention to objects and fragmented memories that no longer resemble their original form and value. It was her attempt to distill a moment of calm within chaos, or “the eye of the storm.” As intended, the frozen moment of clutter and anarchy recreated by Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View delivers the effect of a muted scene of war.

Born in 1956 in Chershire, England, Cornelia Parker is a sculptor and large scale-installation artist. Parker transforms familiar, sometimes useless, objects to change its meaning through a wide range of methods such as suspending, exploding, crushing, and stretching the materials. Parker was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997.

Her works have been presented in various global art events such as the 16th Sydney Biennale, the 8th Sharjah Biennial, the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, and the 10th Gwangju Biennale. Including her major solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1998, she has been exhibiting internationally including the ICA Boston and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Her works are also collected in private and public collections worldwide such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, Tate, the British Council, and the Henry Moore Foundation.