It’s been 50 years since Cornelia Parker first said to herself: “One day, perhaps I’ll have a show at the Tate.” As a schoolgirl, she had a propensity for art because it allowed her to go off-piste. “I wasn’t overly academic,” she explains, as her new retrospective prepares to open at Tate Britain in London. “I liked going off on a tangent. So yes, I’m very pleased about the show. It’s a dream come true.”
Although Parker’s decades-long career has given her great prominence – shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1997, given an OBE in 2010 – she talks about her work like it’s an unfolding mystery. When we meet over Zoom, she is sporting her trademark short bob and blunt Joan of Arc fringe, theorising about art while dealing with a tree surgeon who is tending to her garden. She is softly spoken and unassuming – surprisingly for an artist whose work is often loud, dramatic and violent. Perhaps the most famous is 1991’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, in which Parker enlisted the British Army to blow up a shed stuffed with toys, gardening tools and stuff found in charity stores. The charred fragments were then suspended from a ceiling, creating an explosion eerily frozen in time.
