Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: an Exploded View

Cornelia Parker enlisted the services of the British Army in order to create her iconic installation ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ . She commissioned a regular garden shed from reclaimed wood, filled it with everyday objects sourced from car boot sales, friends and some of her own personal possessions and subjected it to a controlled explosion courtesy of the Army School of Ammunition. The resulting debris was scattered wide by the force of the blast. Some fragments were damaged beyond recognition, other items were charred and disfigured but retained an element of their original identity. This wreckage was salvaged and hung from wires to create a three-dimensional suspended sculpture, lit centrally by a single light bulb. Given the sense of violent destruction that the piece initially evokes, its inspiration comes from an unlikely source. Parker had a long-held fascination with the indestructibility of characters portrayed in children's cartoons: the Tom and Jerry moments of being flattened and instantly revitalised. In this case the fragments of the familiar shed and its contents were resurrected into the newly formed sculpture: allowing the viewer to contemplate the fragility of existence by capturing the brutality of a destructive force in a static moment.

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