Author Description

Cornelia Parker is one of the most original and inventive artists working in Britain today. Her wide-ranging practice, chiefly in sculpture and installation, touches on the fragility of human experience and is rich with visual and literary allusions. Exploring everything from ghosts and gravity to relics and the unconscious, she transforms everyday, ordinary objects into compelling works of art. Parker's projects - which have included blowing up a shed, steamrolling musical instruments and sending meteorites back into space - have captured the public imagination since she first came to prominence. In this book the artist takes the reader on a personal tour through her works. Beginning with the small-scale sculptures she made as a student, it includes her work in lead and plaster, silver and gold, alongside drawings, photographs, video pieces and installations. Parker's engaging commentaries describe her adventures with the unlikely institutions that have helped create her art, from the British Army to the Royal Mint, as well as her wide-ranging travels, which have taken her from the funeral parlours of São Paulo to the crown-of-thorn workshops of Bethlehem. Organized chronologically, the book features thematic essays by Iwona Blazwick, contextualizing the artist's work and pointing to her key influences and interests, from abstraction and performance to archaeology and psychoanalysis. The book features a foreword by Yoko Ono and an introduction by curator Bruce Ferguson. Supplemented by an up-to-date biography, bibliography and exhibition history, this is the definitive book on one of the most popular artists of our time.