Three artworks Cornelia Parker has created with unusual collaborators

From the British Army to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, or famous actor and Texan snake farmers (to name a few), Cornelia Parker's partnerships are unique, and they result in truly collaborative works of art. Below are three standouts which will be included in Parker’s Tate Britain exhibition:

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (otherwise known as ‘the exploded shed’) is the contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the Army School of Ammunition in Warwickshire at the request of the artist. It was made during a period of major social and political upheaval in Britain, from the Brixton Riots to the IRA bombings. The artist used the surviving pieces to create her installation – a freeze-frame explosion of the shed.

'When you go to a car boot sale in Britain, it’s usually the stuff from their shed or garage ... It’s like the attic, but I couldn’t blow up an attic,' she said, also explaining one of the reasons why she chose to work with the British Army. 'The British Army is great because they’re the guys who’re supposed to protect you, that’s their job, yet they could help me blow up this little cosy old shed.'

Magna Carta (2015)

Magna Carta (An Embroidery) a 13-metre-long artwork, recognises the collaborative nature of Wikipedia and how it intertwines with all our lives. It involved over 250 people, a willing team from all walks of life to ‘crowdsource’ the artwork, as Cornelia put it – this was not a project about one single person. 'I wanted the work to involve lots of hands, like Wikipedia has, and to have all the complexity that the Wikipedia page had.'

Included was, for example, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, who stitched the words ‘justice, denial and delay’ as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who stitched ‘user manual.’ The main body of Wikipedia’s detailed text on the history and modern uses of Magna Carta was stitched by 46 prisoners in the British Prison System – a charity taught them how to embroider.  And all illustrations were done by members of the Embroiderers’ Guild, 14 women from all over Britain.

Blackboard Drawings (2017)

In 2017, Parker began working alongside 5–10-year-old schoolchildren from a primary school in London to create a series of blackboard drawings. She asked the children to write news headlines from various UK and US newspapers and copy them onto blackboards. The blackboards are titled News at Five, News at Six and so on, and each news time matched the age of the children who wrote on them.

'I wanted to do something with primary school children because they have this incorruptibility,' Parker explained. 'It’s quite poignant, because these children are going to live with the consequences of these news headlines. They can’t control any of it, they’re just innocent bystanders.'

The exhibition Cornelia Parker is at Tate Britain 19 May – 16 Oct 2022.