After completing a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Parker found traditional pathways into the arts financially and structurally inaccessible as someone from a working-class background. While continuing to make work independently, she moved into fashion, ecommerce, and technology, eventually building a career within digital commerce and customer behaviour systems.

This experience became conceptually significant to her practice. Exposure to algorithmic systems, behavioural influence, consumer psychology, and structures of optimisation deepened her interest in the ways power operates through persuasion, repetition, aspiration, and control, particularly in relation to gender, labour, beauty, and identity.

Although her career moved outside the traditional art world for many years, making remained a constant alongside her professional work. Returning more fully to sculpture later in life, Parker now develops large-scale installations that explore systems of tension, containment, and spectacle through the collision of industrial forms and feminine-coded materials.