Gender and art

Artist Cornelia Parker talks to Tim Adams about drawing with bullets, cracks in the pavement – and growing up with a mother who’d been in the Luftwaffe

Cornelia Parker’s retrospective runs at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester from 14 February until 31 May.

http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/

"In the quarter of a century since the artist Cornelia Parker came to public prominence she has been associated with an exceptionally wide variety of work. She was initially known for pieces in which she violently destroyed objects and then eerily suspended the resulting debris from gallery ceilings. For Thirty Pieces of Silver (1989), she flattened a motley collection of silver-plated objects, including musical instruments, teapots, candlesticks and cutlery, under a steamroller, leaving them "robbed of their third dimension". Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) involved blowing up a garden shed. But later came work as diverse as The Maybe (1995) featuring the actor Tilda Swinton lying in a glass vitrine in the Serpentine Gallery, in London; a melted silver dollar drawn into wire so thin it was as long as the Empire State Building is tall; the wrapping of Rodin's The Kiss in a mile of string; and a 40-minute video of Parker interviewing Noam Chomsky."

Cornelia Parker

Frith Street Gallery, London, W1

Starts 7 June, until 23 July 2013