The British artist Cornelia Parker likes to take every day objects -- coins, teaspoons, feathers -- and force us to take a fresh look at them and what they stand for. She does this by crushing and stretching items, blowing them up and presenting them in new contexts.
She has flattened coins under the wheels of passing trains, steamrolled over silverware, exploded a garden shed, thrown things off the Cliffs of Dover and cut up a loaf of bread and a necktie using Marie Antoinette's guillotine. She then takes the debris and gives it new life in beautiful and arresting arrangements.
She's the kind of person who saw potential in a Texas church destroyed by lightning and exposed its irony and poignancy by making a mobile out of the charred remains. Her art, she says, is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration. After a violent death, there's rebirth in the calm of her installations. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
