Artist Profile of Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. She was born during the year 1956 in Cheshire, England. She was raised on a Cheshire smallholding/farm.

Cornelia Parker has rural roots, as Simon Hattenstone for the Telegraph writes, "her sickly father had never been out with a girl until he was 34 and met Parker's mother, a German girl who had been traumatised as a Luftwaffe nurse in the Second World War. Life was tough and physical – mucking out the pigs, milking the cows. My father wanted a boy badly and didn't get one, so I was happy to be the surrogate boy. I was very strong, always doing manual labour."

I believe this is what made Cornelia such as strong character which is reflected in her work. (See my post titled Artist's research: Cornelia Parker)

She trained at Wolverhampton Polytechnic because she was turned down by the larger colleges in London. After her Masters degree Cornelia lived a bohemian lifestyle in the fringes of Eastern London where she worked from home. Later, Cornelia Parker studied art and received her MFA at Reading University in 1982. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton (2000), the University of Birmingham (2005), and the University of Gloucestershire (2008).

While she got teaching jobs in the art schools that had rejected her, she was opposed for years to the commercial art market, and wasn’t represented by a gallery until she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. Parker is married to the American artist Jeff McMillan. She has a daughter Lily, with whom she became pregnant with at the age of 44. The pregnancy is depicted in a piece of art in which Parker purchased the night gown worn in the film Rosemary's Baby hoping to wear it for birth but it was too small so she displayed it as a piece of art.

Because she wasn’t supported by Charles Saatchi or any other rich collector – she wasn’t even represented by a gallery until 1997 – two of her important early works, which hold the key to much of her later work in terms of ideas, process and materials, were bought by the Tate. One was the shed; the other was “Thirty Pieces of Silver”, from 1988. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with silver, a material she has grown to love for its physical adaptability as much as for its powers of association.

When Parker was in her early teens, her mother, who was German, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. “She had been a nurse in Germany during the war. And I think horrors happened to her, which caused her to become mentally ill later on.”
She credits her father with her artistic skills even though they had an uneasy relationship.
“My father was English, and a controlling patriarch, quite dominant … towards the end of his life I sort of made peace with him. He was the most extraordinarily creative person and maybe some of my creativity comes from him.”

In 2001, the Galeria de Arte Moderne in Turin presented a major one-person show, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioned a permanent installation for the British Galleries.
Her works are held by numerous public and private collections in Europe and the USA including the British Council, London, The Tate Gallery, London, Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut, ICA, Boston and MoMA, New York.

Parker will have her first solo show at Alan Cristea Gallery in October 2015.

The quotes are taken from her book ‘Cornelia Parker’ by Iwona Blazwick, with extensive commentaries, published by Thames & Hudson 2014