Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire, UK in 1956. She is an English sculptor and installation artist that specializes in deconstructionism. She studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in 1974 then moving onto Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1975. She received her MFA from Reading University in 1982, since then she has received many honorary degrees from many of the colleges that she attended.

Her most notable works include a blown up garden shed and 30 smashed pieces of silver. Her transformations of everyday objects play with the general meaning of things like decorum and utility. She enhances the importance of certain objects by making people question whether or not this object is particularly important or not. Also, Parker likes to make connections with historical figures and her artwork today. She enjoys collecting relics that are famously used and making them into pieces of art. Some say that this would be defacing of the themselves, however, I think that what she does makes the relics that much more charitable and humble in their meaning.
The artist loves to resurrect things that have been shut out of everyday use in today's modern society. She likes to look at the possibilities of the materials rather then look at how they had been used in the past, and how the had failed or succeeded at that task. She transforms these avoided objects by burning, stretching, cutting, or making the object explode. Then she uses the materials that she manipulates to make these beautiful, and definitely unique pieces of artwork.

One of her projects that was worldly recognized was one called Pornographic Drawings. This project involved her melting down tapes of old porno videos and using the ink to draw with. She got the tapes from H.M. customs and Excise. They were confiscated in the late 1960s for being to risque for the public to view. Now out of date H.M. basically gave her the tapes for free. As you can see, from the image on the right, the drawings are mimics of each other if folded in half. She drew them this way to symbolize unity and similarity in the society that we live in, however, when we get underneath the surface we all have things that we want to hide, however, it makes us who we are.
Parker is also obsessed with the way cartoon deaths mimic those in real life. She like to think about the uncontrollable and use that vision to make something that is quiet and contemplative. She like to make the human mind think through her works as well as comment on the social acceptance of violence, globalization, consumerism, and mass- medias affect in our lives. She does this be taking the most ordinary objects and making them into something compelling and extraordinary for the viewer.

I think that the most compelling thing about Parkers work is the fact that she takes something that we all use in life and basically destroys it for the sake of art, yet she does it in a way that make the viewer question everyday reality and the meaning of things that are useful to them. I like the way that she makes the art huge, and lager than life, however, to get the meaning of the piece it is intricated into every piece of material that she uses. She is a truly amazing artist and a visionary. She is not afraid to make a statement and ruffle some feathers of the viewer so that she can make them thing of things that are truly important to them.