Born in Cheshire, England, in 1956, Cornelia Parker studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design and at Wolverhampton Polytechnic before receiving an M.A. from the University of Reading in 1982. Parker first came to public attention through her early exhibitions, with a body of work combining a fascination with material culture and popular iconography; she has transformed found objects, often through destructive processes, making the familiar extraordinary, mutable, and often tragicomic.
Read MoreShe has presented her work in a number of solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
Parker was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010.
Solo exhibitions include: Serpentine Gallery, London, 1998; Deitch Projects NY, 1998; ICA Boston, ICA Philadelphia, Art Club of Chicago, Aspen Art Museum, all 2000; Focus: Cornelia Parker, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2005; New Work by Cornelia Parker, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2005; Never Endings, Ikon, Birmingham, UK, and Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru (2007-2008); Doubtful Sound, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010); Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, Whitechapel Gallery, London (Curation for Collections Gallery of the UK Government Art Collection), 2011; Cornelia Parker, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2015; Magna Carta (An Embroidery), British Library, London, The Whitworth, Manchester, and The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2015; One More Time, a Terrace Wires commission for St. Pancras International Station, London, co-presented by the Royal Academy of Arts (2015).
Group exhibitions include: Still Life, 8th Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 2007; Revolutions–Forms That Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney, 2008; Medals of Dishonour, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2012; The Unseen: 4th Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China, 2012; Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, 2014.