Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton
Cornelia Parker (b. 1956 in Cheshire, UK) studied at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and Reading University. In 1997 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and in 2010 she was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list. Parker is a sculptor and installation artist. Her work involves the manipulation, destruction and rereading of ‘everyday’ objects; turning the ordinary into extraordinary.
For seven days, eight hours a day, Tilda Swinton performed The Maybe – an enigmatic and evocative work exploring a series of unanswerable questions from within the confines of a glass case.
Glass display cases around the gallery contained objects relating to the passing of time – relics of famous fascination, traces of lives lived, objects of historical resonance and of prurient curiosity. Swinton, enclosed in her own glass cabinet – a living, breathing, silent being – invited questions of mortality and of time.
Conceived and performed by Swinton and first performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in an installation created with Cornelia Parker in September 1995, thereafter in the Museo Baracco in Rome in a collaboration with Pierre et Gilles in 1996 and, in 2013, at MoMA in New York.
