Cornilia Parker

Cornelia Parker is an English sculptor and installation artist, she works a lot with light and shadows. A lot of the time light and shadows can be the main component of her artwork, I have not done any artwork based solely or directly on light and shadows before so would be an interesting and unusual technique to try out for this project.

She is best known for our large scale installations one of her most famous installations is named “Cold dark matter an exploded view” in this installation exhibited at the Tate, and appears to be a mound of sharp spiky wooden objects decorated around the light with the shadows of these objects on the walls, this is actually the restored contents of the garden shed which Cornelia Parker instructed the British Army to explode for her, she then reassembled these objects into an exploded view based on photographs and video footage of the shared while exploded. The pieces of the wreckage that survived the explosion suspending from the ceiling as it held in mid-explosion.

This is not the first time she’s explored wooden explosions, as MA student she had made a series of wooden explosions, but on a much smaller scale she then left these models outside for the weather to eventually disintegrate.

In an interview with the Tate curator, Cornelia Parker described her perception of the shed “as a place where you store things you cannot quite throw away. Like the attic, it’s a place where toys, tools, outgrown clothes and records tend to congregate.

Which sounds like to me what she is trying to show is a build up of cluttered objects collected over time, if you like rubbish at the time, but not so much that you are ready to throw them away. It’s just baggage, like baggage we carry around with us. So I understand the idea of exploding the shed, getting rid of the clutter and baggage, just having it disbursed in a split second.

You could attach some emotional or deeper meaning to it, imagine it must be like keeping a journal for a couple of years then burning it. You get a sense of relief like a weight off your shoulders, and in a less deeper sense it must have been quite fun seeing something blown up like that.