Cornelia Parker: The artist who likes to blow things up

The story of art is, after all, the story of destruction – of pummelling things into unexpected expressiveness. Were it not for the crushing of countless crimson cochineal beetles and the violent wrenching of purple mucus glands from millions of living sea snails, the rich reds and vivid violets that vibrate from some of the most memorable paintings in art history, from Rubens to Rembrandt, would be dimmed to dullness. From its very inception, art is wreckage resurrected. We know now that the earliest Stone Age artists incinerated shattered animal skeletons and pulverised the carbonised fragments to produce a radiant black pigment that they used to sketch the static stampede of bison on cave walls. A quick flip through the influential Il libro dell’arte (or The Book of Art”) – a handbook written at the turn of the 15th Century by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini – and one’s eyes are hammered by more than 200 references to the “crushing”, “boiling”, “grinding”, “pounding”, “beating”, and “squeezing” of ingredients necessary to make art – to magick beauty from a blizzard of brokenness. Ruination and imagination more than merely rhyme; they go hand in hand when hands make art.