Cornelia Parker is a British conceptual artist known for her transformative processes of destruction and reconstruction. Collaborating with scientists and technicians, she employs acts such as explosion, crushing, and suspension to expose the tension between fragility and resilience. Her works poetically examine how matter, time, and memory intertwine through processes of disintegration and renewal.
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) was created in collaboration with the British Army. Parker detonated a garden shed and then suspended its fragments mid-air, illuminated by a single light bulb. The resulting installation freezes an instant of destruction, transforming chaos into a suspended constellation where violence and beauty coexist.
Cornelia Parker’s practice centers on the regeneration of matter. By detonating and reconstructing, she reorders time and space, transforming destruction into a poetic suspension. This process aligns with Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture in the “expanded field,” where form emerges from action and process rather than static mass. It also echoes Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the “poetic space,” in which fragments and shadows become vessels of memory.
For my own work, Parker inspires me to reconsider destruction as a creative strategy. She demonstrates that material integrity is not necessary for meaning—rupture, suspension, and reassembly can carry powerful emotional and psychological weight. Her meticulous reconstruction of chaos reflects an artist’s negotiation between control and contingency, prompting me to explore how small-scale sculptures might embody similar tensions. Through her methodology, I learn to treat traces of time and fragility as expressive tools—allowing the material itself to speak of memory, loss, and renewal.
#Materiality #Installation Art #Expanded Field #Temporal Space #Destruction And Reconstruction #Poetic Space #Memory And Time #Material Framework #Psychological Space
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Written on: 19 October 2025
Ning-Hui Chung 
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