Cornelia Parker - British Sculptor and Installation Artist
Movements and Styles: Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Sculpture, Young British Artists
Born: July 14, 1956 - Cheshire, England
I resurrect things that have been killed off ... My work is all about the potential of materials - even when it looks like they've lost all possibilities - Cornelia Parker
Experimentation with destroyed objects. Parker is known for her works that are resurrections of things blown up, squashed, chewed, broken, dissolved.... They are destroyed and then revived in another form or suspended in mid detonation.
I am interested in her approach to:
* materiality and objects
* cognitive dissonance through incongruity, opposites
* mass in space
* the essence of material things
* changing the familiar into something else
The Story of Cold Dark Matter, 1991
This artwork was explosion of a garden shed, blown apart with the assistance of the London Ary School of Ammunition.
The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls.
I am interested in the space with and around the mass, in creates like an atmosphere.
A Side of England, 1999
Parker resurrected chalk collected from the wreckage after a storm-induced cliff fall at Beachy Head, Dover Cliffs, England in the formation of a cinema screen.
The affect could represent a suspended moment when the cliff broke away and the land fell to the shaw. Provokes you to image the seen of a significant natural disaster in your minds eye.