Cornelia Parker Exhibition

Cornelia Parker: One Day This Glass Will Break

Saturday 24 January–Saturday 14 March 2026 

An exhibition of new works by artist Cornelia Parker opens this month, bringing a major touring show from Southbank Centre to the gallery.

One Day This Glass Will Break opens on Saturday 24 January and runs until Saturday 14 March 2026. Presented as part of Hayward Gallery Touring from the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre, London, the exhibition brings together twenty large-scale photogravures drawn from three related series made between 2015 and 2017.

Throughout the exhibition, Parker explores her long-standing interest in objects, materials and the traces they carry over time. Familiar and often fragile items such as glassware and photographic negatives appear as shadowy forms, transformed through light and exposure into images that feel both intimate and unsettling.

The exhibition includes works from One Day This Glass Will Break, a series in which Parker experimented with the photogravure, an early photographic process that produces images via exposure onto a copper plate. Influenced by nineteenth century photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, the artist developed a contemporary approach that involved exposing three-dimensional objects directly to light, creating still lifes shaped by absence and shadow.

This investigation continues in Fox Talbot’s Articles of Glass, where Parker worked with historic glassware once owned by Fox Talbot and now held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. These works bring together art history, museum culture and material presence, with the original objects leaving dark, weighty impressions on the plate.

Also included are two works from Thirty Pieces of Silver exposed. Using found glass negatives of antique silver objects, Parker revisits ideas from one of her earliest and most influential artworks. Themes of value, transformation and material change recur, linking past and present within her practice.

Seen together, the exhibition highlights Parker’s persistent fascination with fragility, time and physical processes. Glass acts as both subject and material, admired for its clarity yet defined by its susceptibility to damage. The exhibition title hints at this tension, suggesting a moment suspended between stability and collapse.

One Day This Glass Will Break is open Monday to Friday from 2 pm to 4 pm and on Saturdays from 2 pm to 6 pm. The gallery is closed on Sundays.

Find out more about the Robert Cripps Gallery at Magdalene College.

Header image: Fox Talbot’s Articles of Glass (bottoms up), 2016. Courtesy and © the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery.