Parker made the piece by heating up a fragment of a real meteorite and placing it on a map to create a charred hole on the site of the Houses of Parliament.

This work is part of a series made by Parker in 1998 using a fragment of the Gibeon iron meteorite. This meteorite fell in Namibia in prehistoric times but its remains were only classified as extraterrestrial in 1836.

Parker is known for her poetic reshaping of everyday objects in a way which makes us see them afresh. Among her well-known works is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), in which she arranged for a shed to be blown up by the army and carefully reconstructed by hanging it in fragments from wires. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997.

The Atkinson gallery holds a strong collection of Victorian and Edwardian landscape paintings, as well as an outstanding collection of modern prints and drawings. Meteorite Lands on the Houses of Parliament now joins them there.

Provenance

The artist; Frith Street Gallery