By: Jerry Fan

Erratic artist, Cornelia Parker, has a rather strange way of making beautiful art – blowing and destroying things. It was said that at a young age, Parker was a victim of an abusive family.

When she worked outside as a child, she enjoyed watching coins get crushed by a train. Somehow, Parker found passion in the art of naturally pummeling things until it becomes a new beauty.

According to BBC Culture, “The story of art is, after all, the story of destruction – of pummeling things into unexpected expressiveness.” Cornelia Parker does exactly that! Some examples include using snake venom to the very blade of the guillotine that chopped off the head of Marie Antoinette and plastic explosives. BBC Culture said, “Tate Britain has assembled nearly 100 of Parker’s sculptures, installations, drawings, films and photographs, chronicling more than three decades of her determination to wring from the bruised, broken and battered fragments of life an indestructible beauty.” Obviously, there is something special about the strange way Parker makes art.

The secret to Parker’s work is imagination, ingenuity, and perspective. For example, take the best-known work from Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. In this work, there are various shards of wood hung by strings that are levitating in the air. There is a light bulb in the center, illuminating it, and giving ghostly shadows around it. To the observer, it looks like a frozen-in-time bomb that just blew up. She utilizes the sense of darkness and lightness to create a very interesting image. As said by BBC Culture, “Magnifying everything is what Parker does best. Her robust interventions into the lives of objects and her determination to squeeze meaning from the props of existence, never results in a diminishment of an object’s power, only an intensification.”

Clearly, Parker has a very interesting way of creating beautiful works of art. Sometimes, destroying something worthless, with the right conditions, can make something spectacular.