Artist Center: Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is a master of fine art and a destroyer of fine things. When I say this, it mean it as she takes objects, removes the original meaning to them and gives them new meaning. Some people would say it is destroying objects, but it is giving them new life.

Parker’s most famous work is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991). This piece is made up of parts from an exploded shed and arranged in a way that shows the explosion happening. Each piece is suspended by fishing line, allowing the pieces to sway and move as people walk by. There is a light in the middle of the piece showing the core of the explosion. When you walk in the room with this piece, you can see the explosion happening as if you are the only on who is not frozen in time. This is how Parker’s pieces work. She may take things that are broken, seen as trash, and put them in a way that changes our whole perspective.

Another kind of art that Parker does is takes everyday objects that have uses and takes those uses away from them, by flattening them. We can see this in her famous piece, 30 Pieces of Silver. Each one of the objects used to be useful, whether if it was a fork or a pitcher, it is no longer useful in its original form, thus many people would deem them useless. Parker though transforms them into something new, whether they are hanging as disks from the ceiling or displayed as if they could still be used.

Cornelia Parker changes our outlook on everyday objects, and makes us find new ideas for them, if there are any. She removes objects uses and shows us things we may never see in real life. Parker makes us look at art in a different form.