Cornelia Parker spent the time when she was a small child in a smallholding with a physically abusive father. She used to place coins on the railway tracks to watch them get violently transformed into works of art by the trains, gliding over it. This small moment, though destructive, helped transport a young Cornelia from mucking out stables to illuminating a creative path, which set her heart on fire.
Parker has produced contemporary artworks, whether it be a photograph or an installation, that have kept many people’s minds on edge. She convinced the British Army to help her blow a garden shed to smithereens in 1991, and then suspended the remnants in an installation. In another piece, she sewed through paper with a wire made from melted bullets. In Perpetual Canon, Parker crushed 60 brass instruments, including trumpets, coronets, and a sousaphone with a forklift. She then hung the instruments on the wall, orbiting around a lamp that casted shadows onto the walls. “You can’t tell the objects are squished in the shadows,” explains Parker. “It’s like a ghost band, as it were.”
Parker lets her creativity run free.
“In the gallery,” Parker explained in 1990, “the ruined objects are ghostly, levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation. The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece.”
Parker’s works overall have become a poetic symbolization of how she “magnifies everything” through her pieces, sculptures, drawings, and films. The crushed objects found in Thirty Pieces of Silver and the continuations, as well as the ones blown apart by Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, have become far more than just the coin under the train from when she was a child. They have become art.
Article: Cornelia Parker_ The artist who likes to blow things up – BBC Culture.pdf
Parker has produced contemporary artworks, whether it be a photograph or an installation, that have kept many people’s minds on edge. She convinced the British Army to help her blow a garden shed to smithereens in 1991, and then suspended the remnants in an installation. In another piece, she sewed through paper with a wire made from melted bullets. In Perpetual Canon, Parker crushed 60 brass instruments, including trumpets, coronets, and a sousaphone with a forklift. She then hung the instruments on the wall, orbiting around a lamp that casted shadows onto the walls. “You can’t tell the objects are squished in the shadows,” explains Parker. “It’s like a ghost band, as it were.”
Parker lets her creativity run free.
“In the gallery,” Parker explained in 1990, “the ruined objects are ghostly, levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation. The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece.”
Parker’s works overall have become a poetic symbolization of how she “magnifies everything” through her pieces, sculptures, drawings, and films. The crushed objects found in Thirty Pieces of Silver and the continuations, as well as the ones blown apart by Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, have become far more than just the coin under the train from when she was a child. They have become art.
Article: Cornelia Parker_ The artist who likes to blow things up – BBC Culture.pdf
