Among other institutions, Cornelia Parker studied at the University of Reading, where she obtained her doctorate in 2000. In recent years, she has focused on chance and the destructive forces produced by natural elements or by human hand.  She crushes, burns, lets fall, or explodes to then reassemble, reconstitute, and resuscitate, like in a cartoon. She has thus made a name for herself through installations such as Cold, Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991): a garden shed that the British army blew up at the artist’s request and whose fragments she suspended, as though the moment of explosion had remained frozen; a lamp, arranged at the centre of the display, threw the shadows of all of this debris onto the walls. This installation paradoxically combined catastrophe, silence, and contemplation. Parker is also renowned for The Maybe (1995), in which she invited actress Tilda Swinton to sleep inside a glass display case at the Serpentine Gallery.

On an entirely different scale, she is fond of the imprints and marks left by historical figures: in her microphotographs, dust lying on Freud’s divan (Marks Made by Freud, Subconsciously, 2000) and the chalk marks on Einstein’s blackboard (Einstein’s Abstracts, 1999) are like tiny testimonies of a bygone existence that are nevertheless symbolic. These artworks would be very hard to identify if it were not for their title and subtitle. Playing on visual and verbal combinations, Parker attaches great importance to language as well as to its influence. Her work thus gives rise to metaphors and personal or cultural associations. Many solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her around the world, and her artworks are present in many collections as well as at events such as the Sydney Biennial (2008) or the 8th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2007). She featured among the four nominees for the Turner Prize in 2007.