Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire, UK. She studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and received her MFA from the University of Reading in 1982. She lives and works in London.

Parker is widely known for her large-scale installations that transform familiar objects through acts of destruction and alteration. In Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), she had the British Army blow up a garden shed, suspending the fragments around a central light source to freeze the moment of explosion. Her practice explores the physical properties of materials and their cultural, emotional, and historical charge, using processes such as exploding, stretching, burning, or compressing.

Her work often engages with history, celebrity, and mortality. In The Maybe (1995), created with actress Tilda Swinton at the Serpentine Gallery, Swinton appeared asleep in a glass case, surrounded by relics of famous historical figures. Parker has also intervened directly with historic artworks, notably wrapping Rodin’s The Kiss in a mile of string for the Tate Triennial (The Distance).

Through ongoing series such as Avoided Objects and works like Pornographic Drawings (1997), Parker continues to question the transformation and survival of materials. As she has stated: “My work is all about the potential of materials – even when it looks like they’ve lost all possibilities.”