Cornelia Parker - Biography

Cornelia Parker (b. 1956 in Cheshire, England) is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. Her work is known internationally for its complex, ironical style. It is highly allusive and patterned with cultural references to cartoons, a style which she adapts to her need to capture things in the moment before they slip away and are lost to our perception. The themes which drive her work are consumerism, globalization, and the role of the mass media in contemporary life.

Many of Cornelia Parker's artworks are ephemeral or 'site-specific', created for a single time and place. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) was such a work, in which Cornelia Parker had the British Army explode a garden shed, and the fragments were suspended in the air around a single source of illumination casting shadows of the shattered pieces on the walls. This work was displayed at the Tate Modern Gallery. The striking style of the suspended sculpture, which challenges the limitations of time and space, is typical of Cornelia Parker's work. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) (1999) is another example of this type of sculpture, in which charred fragments of a building supposedly destroyed by arson are suspended by wires and pins in a pattern which is both geometrical and chaotic. The work captures the identity of the two states by a retroactive positioning, much in the manner of a forensic scientist might reconstruct the scene of a crime.

Cornelia Parker studied art and received her MFA at Reading University in 1982. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton (2000), the University of Birmingham (2005), and the University of Gloucestershire (2008). Cornelia Parker was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 and featured in the 8th International Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in 2007.

Cornelia Parker has had numerous solo exhibitions in England, Europe, and the United States, at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1998), ICA Boston (2000), the Galeria Civica de Arte Moderne in Turin (2001), the Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2004), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2005), the Modern Museum at Fort Worth, Texas (2006) and Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima Peru (2008). The work of Cornelia Parker was included in group exhibitions and public collections at the Tate Gallery in London, MOMA in New York, the British Council, Henry Moore Foundation, De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Yale Center for British Art and many other venues.

Some of her most noted exhibitions and works include Chomskian Abstract (2008), Never Endings (2007, 2008), Brontëan Abstracts (2006), The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) (2003), Subconscious of a Monument (2002), Blue Shift (2001), Edge of England (1999), and The Maybe, in collaboration with Tilda Swinton (1995).