Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View

Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991 (Image credit: Tate Gallery website)

Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View suspends a single moment: an explosion frozen in mid-air. Once an ordinary garden shed, the structure was blown apart in a controlled detonation carried out by the British Army. Parker then gathered the fragments and hung them from the ceiling in a delicate constellation, illuminated by a single exposed lightbulb at its centre. The result is both violent and unexpectedly beautiful; a ruin held open, destruction rendered luminous.

The title draws on scientific language. “Cold dark matter” refers to an invisible and unquantifiable substance believed to make up much of the universe. By borrowing this term, Parker connects the unfathomable scale of the cosmos to the most mundane of domestic structures. The debris of everyday life, splintered wood, rusted tools, and children’s toys, is elevated into something celestial. Lit from within, the fragments cast intricate shadows across the gallery walls, transforming chaos into pattern, and violence into something momentarily radiant. Beauty emerges not despite the destruction, but because of the new relationships formed between fragments, light, and space.

The origins of the shed are crucial. A garden shed is a space of storage, a quiet refuge for objects that are no longer useful but usually too meaningful to discard, it’s also a place for forgotten objects . As Parker has noted, sheds hold the residue of personal histories. By blowing one up, she obliterates this safe space, yet in doing so reveals the hidden emotional weight of the objects inside. Ruin becomes a method of revelation: what was once overlooked or forgotten is suddenly brought into sharp, almost reverent focus.

Importantly, Parker avoided using a person’s old shed. Although the materials feel intimate, the work resists biography. The objects were collected over three months, forming a collective archaeology of ordinary life. After the explosion, many fragments were scorched or lost entirely. Absence becomes part of the composition, reminding us that ruin is never total preservation; it is shaped as much by what disappears as by what remains.

Parker has described explosions as archetypal images, instant, spectacular, and culturally familiar. Cold Dark Matter stretches that instant into a durational experience. As viewers move through the installation, walking around the sculpture, shadows animate the space, making the shed appear to re-explode endlessly. Objects once rendered “dead” by obsolescence are reanimated, suspended in a fragile equilibrium. Here, ruin is not an end state but a transformation: destruction becomes a condition for renewed attention.

This is not a traditional sculpture. There is no stable mass, no heroic form. Instead, Parker creates a sculptural atmosphere, a beauty born of fragmentation. As she has said, she is less interested in solid objects than in “the space with and around the mass.” The work invites us to see brokenness not as failure, but as a generative state, where meaning proliferates precisely because coherence has been lost.

To stand beneath Cold Dark Matter is to experience the precarious elegance of ruin. The sculpture surrounds the viewer, blurring the boundary between observer and debris. It suggests that beauty does not always reside in wholeness, but in the delicate balance between collapse and suspension. In Parker’s hands, ruin becomes luminous, not because it denies violence, but because it asks us to look at what remains with renewed care. It is a reminder that destruction can reveal as much as it erases, and that what breaks open can sometimes teach us how to look more closely at what remains.