View by Year  |  A-Z List of Artists

Cornelia Parker
Shortlisted: 1997

Cornelia Parker's art has been described as an 'imaginative investigation into the nature of matter'. She tests the physical properties of substances and things, at the same time playing on their public and private symbolic meaning. Her methods of exploration have included suspending, exploding, crushing and stretching. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View  was made by blowing up a garden shed and its contents, and then hanging the scorched and mutilated fragments in a cluster around a single light bulb.

Mass (Colder Darker Matter) 1997 Charcoal retrieved from a church struck by lightning, Lytle, Texas, USA 366 x 320 x 320cm The artist and Frith Street Gallery, London © the artist Photo: Tate Photography

Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire, England in 1965. She studied at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and Reading University from 1975 to 1982. Parker was shortlisted in 1997 for her exhibition at the Chapter Gallery, Avoided Object, which demonstrated her exploration of the secret lives of both ordinary and strange objects.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Cornelia Parker in the Tate Collection