When she was little, Cornelia Parker placed coins on the nearby railway tracks and watch them get crushed-into works of art. Her art is different from any other artist’s. Once, she put snake venom on the blade of the guillotine that lopped off the head of Marie Antoinette, and another time she persuaded the British Army to help her blow a garden shed to smithereens in 1991.
Her best-known work is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. This was made with the shattered contents of the garden shed she exploded, suspended by invisible filaments. The contents include twisted fragments of bikes, garden tools, paint pots, and toys. The shadows of these objects are projected by the single lightbulb in the center.
An article in BBC Culture states, “It’s difficult not to detect a grim smirk behind her slashed torso of a doll of Oliver Twist that she sliced in two with the blade that once slipped through the guillotine that cut things short for Marie Antoinette in 1793 – a prop Parker borrowed from Madame Tussauds. And the notion of using complementary splotches of snake venom and anti-venom to create ambiguous Rorschach-like blots that have the interpretative potential to reveal what’s slithering around inside our subconscious is funny. It just is.”
“Violence is part of everybody’s life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilizes all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I’d rather it be out than in,” Parker states.
Art may be considered art only with paint and a canvas, but Cornelia Parker proves art can be anything.
Her best-known work is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. This was made with the shattered contents of the garden shed she exploded, suspended by invisible filaments. The contents include twisted fragments of bikes, garden tools, paint pots, and toys. The shadows of these objects are projected by the single lightbulb in the center.
An article in BBC Culture states, “It’s difficult not to detect a grim smirk behind her slashed torso of a doll of Oliver Twist that she sliced in two with the blade that once slipped through the guillotine that cut things short for Marie Antoinette in 1793 – a prop Parker borrowed from Madame Tussauds. And the notion of using complementary splotches of snake venom and anti-venom to create ambiguous Rorschach-like blots that have the interpretative potential to reveal what’s slithering around inside our subconscious is funny. It just is.”
“Violence is part of everybody’s life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilizes all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I’d rather it be out than in,” Parker states.
Art may be considered art only with paint and a canvas, but Cornelia Parker proves art can be anything.
