Cornelia Parker valuation
Blew up a garden shed, hung the pieces from the ceiling, and lit it from inside.
Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire in 1956 and works by subjecting objects to violence and then suspending the result.
What a work by Cornelia Parker is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire in 1956 and works by subjecting objects to violence and then suspending the result. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, made in 1991, had the army detonate a garden shed and its contents; Parker hung every fragment around a single light bulb so the shadows fill the room. Thirty Pieces of Silver flattened silverware with a steamroller. She has drawn with wire from a melted-down firearm, made work from Rorschach blots and from the chalk cliffs of Dover, and was official election artist in 2017. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997.
Large installations are institutional by nature and rarely trade privately; when they do, the components list, the suspension system and the artist's installation instructions are the work as much as the objects are, and an incomplete set cannot be shown. Smaller works — the wire drawings, the flattened silver pieces, framed fragments and works incorporating found material — are the practical market. Editions and prints exist in modest numbers. Provenance and the exhibition record do most of the work in a valuation.
Where the material came from
Parker's titles often name the material, because its history is the subject. The Pornographic Drawings, a series begun in 1995, are Rorschach blots made with ink from videotape confiscated by HM Customs and Excise and dissolved in solvent. Cold Dark Matter is in the Tate collection, and Tate Britain gave her a retrospective in 2022. Her public projects include Magna Carta (An Embroidery), stitched by some two hundred people for the British Library in 2015, and Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), built on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2016.
For an owner, the account of the material in the title and on the certificate is part of the work, so the gallery paperwork matters more than usual. A small work whose title describes its source should come with documentation that matches that description, and a work separated from its certificate is harder to place. Fragments and assemblages should also be checked against any hanging or installation instructions that came with them.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
