Sculptor and Installation Artist
Sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker OBE RA is one of Britain’s most acclaimed artists. She became known for her large scale works including ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’. She suspended the fragments of a garden shed, blown up for her by the British Army. She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrolling, shooting full of holes and explosions. Her work contains themes of gain and loss, and the presence of visual and verbal allusions enables the viewer to witness the transformation of ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. At the opening of Manchester’s Whitworth gallery, she teamed up with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to turn fragments of drawings by Picasso, Constable and Turner into a new artwork, and her solo exhibition was greeted to critical acclaim. Recently she produced an extraordinarily democratic and thought-provoking embroidery based on Wikipedia’s Magna Carta page which was displayed at the British Library as part of their celebration of the 800th anniversary of the granting of Magna Carta; in the same year the public was treated to the iconic installation ‘One More Time’ at St Pancras station. In 2016 she was the first female artist to be commissioned to create an artwork for the roof garden of the New York Met, which resulted in Transitional Object (PsychoBarn). Once again was the first woman when she was chosen as the 2017 official election artist.