Cornelia Parker Analysis

Cornelia Parker, an artist most famous for the piece, Cold Dark Matter (An Exploded View.) Parker was born in 1956 and studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974–75) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975–78). She received her MFA from Reading University in 1982 and honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton in 2000, the University of Birmingham (2005) and the University of Gloucestershire (2008). In 1997, Cornelia Parker was shortlisted for the Turner Prize along with Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, and Gillian Wearing the latter of three then went on to winning the prize. Parker is best known for large-scale installations such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) first shown at the Chisenhale Gallery in Bow, East London in which she had a garden shed blown up by the British Army and suspended the fragments as if freezing the explosion process in time. In the center was a light which cast the shadows of the wood onto the walls of the room. Parker main inspiration for doing such pieces as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View could possibly have come from the fact that her mother was German and was in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, and was then a prisoner of war for a couple of years after the war. Her British grandfather also fought in the trenches in the First World War so this may lead some insight into pieces such as the one I am going to be looking at.

This piece is a mixed media piece containing mainly a shed a some personal effects to Parker. I love the idea of that by hanging the bits of the shed and placing a light in the middle of the room to make it cast all these shadows on the wall makes it like a snapshot of time, but at the same time it is also quite a distorted snapshot of time and that means this piece is not easy to replicate which means it’d be unique every time again similar to the fact that nobody’s mental illness is the same as someone else who also suffers with it and I think this would be a fantastic element to include into my work and I plan on doing this at least once and maybe develop it even further.

I particularly want to explore what she was saying when she said 'she wanted to rob the shed of its pathos' with pathos being an appeal to emotion, and is a way of convincing an audience of an argument by creating an emotional response, and this is what I want to create in my work.