Viewing Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain

Cornelia Parker came to prominence in the late 1980s with such experimental works as Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-89), a large-scale installation of suspended and flattened silver objects including teapots, candlesticks and dinnerware. Then came Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), a garden shed frozen at the moment of explosion, its fragments surrounding a single lightbulb.

This eye-catching artwork currently hangs at the heart of a magnificent and long-overdue retrospective at Tate Britain. Featuring over 90 artworks spanning immersive installations, sculptures, film, photography and drawing, as well as two new works created especially for the exhibition, it charts Parker’s exploration of contemporary issues such as violence, human rights, politics and environmental disaster.

Other notable highlights include War Room (2015), a vast gallery created from the reams of perforated red paper negatives left over from the production of British Legion remembrance poppies, and Magna Carta (An Embroidery), also from 2015, which comprises a thirteen-metre long collectively hand-sewn embroidery of a Wikipedia page. In the cinema room, you’ll see several films Parker made during the election campaign leading up to the 2017 General Election.

Uniting the ‘poetic and the spectacular’, this mesmerising show is not to be missed!