Cornelia Parker masterfully captures the beauty that resides in destruction
A review of one of the nation’s most adored contemporary artist’s current retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain
Whether exploding sheds, steamrolling silver, or chopping up guns, contemporary artist Cornelia Parker’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary has long established her as one of the most compelling contemporary artists of our time. Born in 1956 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, she studied at the West Surrey College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, developing a distinctly experimental and transformative approach that has defined her career.
This summer, Tate Britain presents a comprehensive retrospective (19 May–16 October 2022) spanning over three decades of her career — a captivating experience that promises to intrigue even those less inclined towards the arts. The show gathers Parker’s most celebrated works — Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) and Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988) — alongside more intricate, lesser-known creations such as Precipitated Gun (2015) and Poison and Antidote (2010), which are unfolded across a labyrinth of rooms.
Andrea Schlieker, assisted by Nathan Ladd, has curated this presentation with deft precision to keep visitors continually alert: one moment the visitor finds themselves enveloped within a vast installation, and the next, absorbed by a quiet video projection. This oscillation between scale and medium ensures that the ‘wow factor’ of the larger works never wanes. Each piece is accompanied by a short statement penned by the artist herself, offering essential context — without which much of the exhibition’s subtlety might easily pass unnoticed.
Opening with the monumental Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988) sets a tone of suspended tension and curiosity. Over 1,100 silver-plated objects — from cigarette cases to musical instruments — hang just 102mm above the floor, frozen mid-fall. Since childhood, Parker has been fascinated by flattening objects, from coins on railway tracks to steamrollered silver, exploring how destruction transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary. In this work, she invites the viewer to confront the world’s destructive forces while finding beauty and value in what has been broken — a preoccupation with renewal that feels almost autobiographical.
In an interview with ABC Australia, Parker reflected: “I had a bullying father and schizophrenic mother — a father who did not allow me to play. I worked all through my childhood… The idea of not being able to play, or if I was playing, having to sneak off to do it. This is why art school seemed so attractive, because it felt like you were just playing.” These formative experiences resonate through her experimental practice. Without context, some of her works might even appear the remnants of an unsupervised, precocious teenager’s mischief — yet when viewed through the prism of her past, they become profoundly cathartic acts of reclamation.
This repressed playfulness is palpable throughout the exhibition, particularly in Shared Fate (1998). Within a transparent coffin lies an Oliver Twist ragdoll, severed cleanly in two by the very guillotine that executed Marie Antoinette. His freckled face grimaces beneath his blue cap, his fate quite literally ‘shared’ with history. On paper, the image borders on macabre, yet in person, it carries a wry humour that feels distinctly Parker-esque. Her dark wit — the ability to find comedy amidst tragedy — endears her to audiences and affirms her status as a true British treasure.
Violence is a recurring theme in Parker’s oeuvre, yet it is never gratuitous. She describes her approach as ‘cartoon violence’, inspired by the slapstick absurdity of Road Runner (1949) or silent films, where destruction is rendered almost poetic. Her signature techniques — flattening, slicing, exploding — freeze moments of impact in time, inviting the viewer to examine chaos with curiosity rather than fear.
Arguably her most iconic work, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), serves as the exhibition’s centrepiece, exemplifying this perfectly. The shattered remains of a garden shed, suspended mid-blast, are dramatically lit to cast shadows that seem to perpetuate the explosion indefinitely. Far from an impulsive spectacle, each object — gathered over months from her own possessions, those of friends, and car boot sales — carries intimate significance, underscoring why her accompanying texts are indispensable to understanding her art.
Duality pervades Parker’s practice — light and dark, destruction and rebirth, privilege and poverty. Breathless (2001), one of the exhibition’s most affecting pieces, consists of 54 brass band instruments suspended in a circular formation, their gleaming surfaces alternating between polished and tarnished. Originally conceived for the British Galleries to symbolise the coexistence of opposites, it has been reimagined here at Tate Britain with remarkable sensitivity to space and light. As viewers move around the sculpture, shifting shadows and reflections animate its surface, creating a dialogue between stillness and motion that feels almost musical.
In recent years, Parker’s work has grown increasingly political. “It is a very inexplicable world we live in at the moment, and I am always trying to understand it in some kind of way,” she told ABC Australia in 2019. This impulse led to her appointment as the United Kingdom’s first official General Election Artist in 2017. Through Election Abstract, she documented the frenetic digital theatre of the campaign by collecting over 1,500 Instagram images and videos.
Since 2009, Parker has increasingly turned to film to explore complex socio-political narratives. Her 2007 debut, Chomskian Abstract, features an interview with philosopher Noam Chomsky on American politics and ecology, while Made in Bethlehem (2012) offers a poignant meditation on faith and conflict. In it, Parker films a Palestinian father and son crafting thorn crowns for Christian pilgrims — an act of quiet coexistence that speaks volumes without overt commentary. Through such works, Parker demonstrates art’s ability to digest the unpalatable and humanise the intractable.
Critics sometimes dismiss Parker’s work as simplistic or technically slight. Yet, as she remarked in Imelda Barnard’s 2021 book From the Sculptor’s Studio, “Doing painting for half of my degree, I missed the induction courses of the sculptural techniques, and so I just decided I was going to use techniques out in the world.” It is precisely this rejection of convention — this resourceful, non-conformist spirit — that distinguishes her oeuvre. Beneath each seemingly straightforward concept lies a deeply layered web of ideas and emotions, awaiting discovery by those willing to look closely.
Parker’s art may not always rely on traditional craftsmanship, but it possesses a rare alchemy: the fusion of ferocity and playfulness, intellect and instinct. Through her work, she reminds viewers that destruction can be generative, and that beauty often emerges from what has been undone. In Parker’s hands, obliteration becomes a form of creation — an act of renewal that invites the viewer to see the world anew. Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain is not merely an exhibition; it is a meditation on transformation itself, and a masterful presentation of the beauty that resides in destruction.
