DANGER! Cornelia Parker imagine...

As a child, Cornelia Parker had an unusual hobby.

She would take her pocket money,

lay it on the railway track and wait for it to be violently squashed.

I was terrified of trains.

I remember my older sister, you know,

forced me to stay there when a train went by, and I kind of...

No, it was good, in a way,

cos I think it sort of broke the spell a bit.

I would never have done the putting the coins on the railway track

if she hadn't helped me get through the fear.

The coins that I squashed on the railway track,

I kept for a long time,

you know, I'd got them as this token of destructive power,

this terrible beast.

And then, you know, that began a long relationship with squashing!

Cornelia Parker is one of Britain's most original and inventive artists.

A sculptor working with found materials,

she often uses brutal methods

to transform everyday objects into delicate,

thought-provoking works of art.

There was always a kind of dark undertow to everything I did

and still do.

Cornelia is celebrated by art critics at home.

But this summer, she's in New York.

She's here to take on the most prestigious

commission of her career,

a site-specific piece for the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When I actually came up and saw Central Park

and the skyline of New York I just thought,

"Well, you couldn't wish for a better plinth, could you?"

So I just thought I'd add something to the view.

This is one of the great museums of the world.

Everyone's going to be coming to this.

There's a lot... So no pressure, then?

-No pressure, no.

-No.

-I try not to think about the pressure.

-There is pressure, though.

-There is pressure.

But life's too short. You only get these chances, you know,

once in a while, so you just grab them when you can.

By the end of this journey, you'll have to take me away!

Get me committed!

Like many of the best stories, this one begins with a road trip.

In America, there's all that distance and in the distance,

there's plenty of space for your imagination.

There's so many amazing on-the-road films.

Films is where we get our idea of America from.

Look at this. Amazing.

Nice log cabin.

In search of inspiration for her Met roof commission,

Cornelia is turning to the architecture of rural America.

I just had this vision straight away of a Dutch red barn sitting on the

roof of the Met, with all the skyscrapers behind it,

so taking it back to its very earliest rural roots,

when it was wilderness, really.

So we're on a red barn hunt.

I want to track down one of these archetypes that I've

been dreaming about.

The red barn's wholesome image is deep-rooted in the American psyche.

It harks back to the earliest European settlers and represents the

American dream of building a better life through honest toil.

It's an image now routinely exploited as

a patriotic backdrop for politicians on the campaign trail.

Oh, look. There's one. Gorgeous.

Just take that.

Beautiful.

Cornelia's ambitious idea is to take a traditional red barn and place it

on the roof of the Met.

Oh, it's gorgeous.

It's fantastic.

It's a project that will see her delving deep into her own

rural upbringing.

Takes me back.

That smell of the hay is fantastic.

And the cobwebs.

This is just...

taking me back to somewhere...

Obviously, a much smaller place.

Born in 1956 in rural Cheshire,

Cornelia Parker grew up on a smallholding.

So what kind of kid were you?

What kind of child were you?

I was a tomboy. I mean, my father

had wanted desperately to have a son and he got three girls.

I was the only planned one.

I was the middle one but I was the one that was going to be a boy,

and then, I wasn't, so my father said, "Right, OK,

"you know, this one's mine,"

so I became, quite early on, almost like his

sidekick, his person to go out and muck out the pigs and do all the

digging and all the physical labour and worked incredibly hard.

I had a very hard-working childhood.

Did you find the notion that you were

the surrogate son a problem or an

-opportunity?

-I think the whole being brought up as a boy was a bit

strange, because I'd go to school, you know,

with dirt on my fingernails and I had, you know,

sort of grafter's hands and all the girls at school

had delicate hands and

I felt very self-conscious, because I was obviously,

you know, covered in bruises and stuff and climbing trees.

And so, yeah, it set me slightly apart.

I think I was very shy but I communed with the animals.

Hello.

Hello!

We had cows and pigs and cats and dogs and I felt very much at home,

you know, with the creatures.

Come on.

How did you entertain yourself

when you weren't reading and being shouted at?

Erm...

Well, I would disappear.

I'd go off down the fields and I could, you know,

go for miles around and just be absent.

That was the only way I could get to play or have time for myself and

then, my father would be angry when I came back, because, you know,

I was needed to do other things.

So time off was stolen, basically,

and so that was something, I think,

which informed by career, because making art was like extended play,

so I chose this thing that I wasn't allowed to do as my career.

I'm just thinking about scale now

and how that will look as the skyline of New York.

I want to imagine what that's like on the roof of the Met.

Oh, lovely and warm.

Temperature and colour.

I mean, that's the colour I want.

I want this kind of archetypal red.

Traditionally, you know, in Europe,

the red came from mixing either rust or animal blood with linseed oil.

With Cornelia Parker, things are rarely straightforward or benign.

While researching red barns,

her thoughts turned to a much more sinister piece.

I think in my work, there's always a bit of a dark undertow,

so the barn on the roof would've been great,

but it wasn't dark enough,

you know, and I suppose that it's like that duality.

I've always liked that ambiguity.

The good and the evil, the benign and the malign.

It's almost like getting the temperature right.

You don't want things to be too sweet,

or you don't want to be too unsavoury! But somehow, you know,

you want all those things in there.

And I was trying think what the barn represented.

It seemed to be about wholesomeness in America.

And then I thought, "Well, what's the opposite of that?

"What's evil? What's an evil piece of architecture? And I immediately

thought of the Psycho house in the original film.

PSYCHO THEME

In 1960,

the British director Alfred Hitchcock

shocked American cinema with his darkly disturbing

horror film, Psycho.

It's a space where the terrible drama of family life takes place.

This twisted drama.

And in this house,

the most dire, horrible events took place.

Terrible things happen, relationships are distorted,

the horrible impulses that underlie normality are played out to their

murderous conclusions.

I just thought, "Well, yeah, the Psycho house,"

you know, and I thought, "Should I build the Psycho house on the...?"

And then, somehow, the red barn and the Psycho house became fused.

I just thought, "Well, I'll make one out of the other.

"I'll get the Psycho house as it was in the original film, built out of

"this innocent red wood."

Cornelia Parker rarely works alone in the studio,

preferring to draw on the specialist skills of others for a particular

piece.

For her Met roof installation,

she is collaborating with Showman Fabricators,

a set design workshop in New York

where her PsychoBarn is beginning to take shape.

The red barn is part of the American sense of who they are.

It's still a foundation myth for Americans,

so it's a wonderful collision of this bright,

optimistic but mythical idea about pioneering America and this dark

vision of a deluded killer.

I wanted to know more about how Cornelia,

a shy tomboy from rural Cheshire,

became one of Britain's best respected contemporary artists.

So we made the journey back to her childhood home.

Never used to be a postbox there.

No.

'A place she hasn't revisited for many years.'

-Home sweet home.

-And so small!

Wow!

God, it's so small.

There'd be two stalls here,

for two cows, and I used to milk the cows by hand in here.

So my stool down here.

And when the cats were all lined up, I'd go and squirt their faces!

But it's tiny, tiny.

You know, I was obviously just a small child, but...

And we had bullocks and we had heifers

but they were out in the fields.

That lime tree was very important to me as a child,

because I spent a lot of time up in its branches.

I also built a little...a little wooden house in there,

so I could disappear off in there

and so my father would shout at me to come down. "Get down!

"Get chopping sticks!

"Brush the yard."

I remember, I always felt guilty for not doing anything useful.

There was always a lot to be done.

Where we're standing now

used to be where we used to slaughter the turkeys.

We used to put the turkeys' heads underneath a stick and we'd stand

either side, and my father would pull the turkey.

And that's why it broke its neck.

So none of this intimidated you at all?

I didn't know anything different. This was my childhood,

so I was quite a willing, willing lad!

Many years later, that explosive energy

would be given a creative release.

In 1991,

Cornelia took a garden shed filled

with the bric-a-brac of everyday life

and asked the British Army to blow it up.

'Five, four, three, two, one,

-'firing!'

-EXPLOSION

The debris was painstakingly collected and reassembled,

to freeze for ever that fleeting moment of destruction.

The institution of the garden shed, a kind of suburban institution,

is something that she was aware of,

the idea that you'd go to the shed to be alone with your thoughts,

to escape from the intensity

of family life, for example,

was something that she was aware of and that the garden shed

was male territory.

And it's an analogy also for the human mind,

all those thoughts that you can't quite get rid of.

It's the stuff that you'd like to get rid of but you just can't.

I mean, this, again, somehow seems to me to relate back to your father

and that relationship.

My father was a very dominant character and quite volatile.

Quite mercurial. You know, he was quite a violent man.

You know, and that's something that we all had to put up with.

Not my mother but just the kids.

I think he wasn't that keen on us taking attention away from him.

I think he'd had 30 years of being looked after by his parents and

being an ill child and all the rest, and he'd had a lot of attention,

so I think we were competing with him for attention.

And so, we never knew when his anger was going to erupt and, you know,

me being the surrogate boy got quite a lot of that, you know,

more than my sisters did.

So I was always living on tenterhooks, you know,

when people think about the volatility in my work,

it might come from having to manoeuvre around

somebody who was quite volatile.

It's not something you've talked about before,

the influence of your father.

No. I never really brought my father up in the past and didn't want my

work to be read through the lens of this tyrannical father,

which really, perhaps, is more accurate, really,

because he was quite a bully and quite a

huge influence on all three of us, upbringing.

He did, you know,

he did quite a lot of damage which I'm happily working through

with my art!

Perhaps there is big explosions

in my work and then there's the calm.

Yes, and a resolution, which is quite often beautiful.

Well, yeah, there was always a quiet centre to the work,

even though it might have quite a volatile history, you know,

there is a resolution.

It's just making sense of disorder.

It's unparalleled.

I don't think it's comparable to any other work of art and it still

remains shocking, enthralling, exciting to look at.

It's, I think, one of the great works of the late 20th century.

From the close-knit and claustrophobic world of her childhood home,

Cornelia found an escape, first through her imagination,

and then through her art.

-When was it that you felt that this was your...

-I wanted to be...

-Yeah, your destiny or your...?

-I don't know.

I was good at it at school and it was the subject I enjoyed

the most and I went on this trip to London

for a week with the A-level art group.

That was, for me, the most eye-opening thing.

And it was just exciting to be away from the countryside,

to get to see physical paintings for the first time,

that I had taped to my wall at home.

I'd never been to a museum before

and I suddenly realised where art fitted into, you know,

where culture was because I had not really experienced it at home.

And I think that's when I turned the corner, that's when I thought,

well, perhaps I could, you know, do something creative with my life.

Was this a sort of rebellious gesture, being an artist?

What would your father have thought of this?

Well, you know, both my parents were very anti it.

I, you know, stayed on to do A levels,

which my father wasn't even that keen about me doing.

But I fought for that cos I knew that was the only way I was going to

be able to go to college and leave home, and so,

I went to art school and my art teachers,

even, didn't want me to go to art school.

Cos nobody had been to art school from my

Crewe Grammar School for Girls which I went to.

Nobody'd gone to art school but I really wanted to go, you know,

and I remember a friend of my mother's saying,

"You must become an art teacher. Is that what you want to do?"

I said, "No, I don't want to become an art teacher. I want to become an artist."

And I remember being very definite about that.

MUSIC: Rebel Rebel by David Bowie.

In 1975, after failing to get into some

of the better-known art colleges,

Cornelia was accepted by Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

The edgy, urban environment soon began to influence her aesthetic.

What was that experience like, then?

It was a very macho art school.

It was 70% guys and sculpture, you know, I wasn't going there to sculpt.

I was going there to be a painter.

And I would sneak off to these derelict houses and start to make things in

the derelict houses, which were not really art, you know -

taking photographs and playing around with materials.

And I was trying to paint things in the studio,

like the light coming in through a window, you know,

but I was struggling with representation and I just thought,

"Well, this is not real life, this is paint, you know,

"this is all pretending to be something else," and I just thought,

can't I have real light coming? You know, I want to use real things.

And then somebody suggested to me that I wasn't a painter.

How did that go down?

Well, it was quite a great relief, actually!

And perhaps I should try some sculpture,

cos I missed all the induction courses.

I didn't do any of the induction courses for sculpture,

so I didn't know how to do anything technically.

And that was quite a good thing, actually,

because it meant that I was trying things in a fairly ad hoc way,

you know, which, coming from a smallholding,

if we had a hole in the fence,

you might put something in the hole and I kind of, you know,

had this facility from childhood, so suddenly, I found my facility,

you know, that using my hands in a physical way, rather than dabbing,

you know, paint on canvas, was much more where my comfort zone was.

Cornelia Parker's early sculptural works were created from materials

gleaned from market stalls,

car-boot sales and everyday objects from around her home.

But in 1998,

Cornelia's childhood obsession with squashing silver resurfaced and she

orchestrated damage on an epic scale.

It would lead to her largest and most ambitious work to date -

one that would mark her coming-of-age as an artist.

30 Pieces Of Silver was a brilliant tour de force of performance.

It was produced by scouring charity shops and flea markets for discarded

silver-plated objects and they themselves have a rather poignant history,

because, of course, they are symbols of aspiration.

Even modest homes would display a candelabra or be given a silver trophy

as an award for sports day.

They had a certain status which they have no longer and of course they'd

been discarded, so she built up an enormous collection of these things,

jugs, trophies, candlesticks,

salt-and-pepper shakers and so forth and then proceeded to lay them out

on a path and then rolled over them with a steam roller.

Steam roller drivers are always wanting to squash stuff,

so for them, it was just... They were very happy.

About 20, 30 people had turned up with their kids and sandwiches and just

made a whole day of it. They just loved it.

There's a sort of catharsis of getting rid of stuff, I think, you know,

a lot of people'd donate me their wedding presents,

things that they didn't want to. Lots of people got lots of bits

of silver plate hanging around the didn't really want.

So people can go and see the exhibit and think, "That's mine!"

Yes!

She suspended each of those slightly sad object on a piece of wire.

It's still a thing of wonder, to see them floating, hovering above space.

There's a beauty, there's a fragility to it and there's this uncanny sense

of the spirit of the object

and the fact that it's become two-dimensional,

is still something that we marvel at.

If it could be squashed, Cornelia would squash it.

Silver and its many and various flattened forms would become a recurrent theme.

I suppose the steam roller was a very theatrical way of getting rid of something.

They use that in Tom and Jerry and in Carry On films and it just seemed

like a very visible way of destroying something.

So I started to use the language of cartoons or slapstick,

or silent films.

I liked that overt, you know,

violence they have in those films.

There's a quote from your book,

"Often in my work, I take beautiful objects and do extreme things to them.

"So that they are overlaid with something a bit more sinister and violent."

And you said, by the way, I'm sure an analyst could have a field day!

So what is it about fear and violence that are so...

So useful a source for you?

If there is not a sense of anxiety there, then perhaps I feel like it's

too sweet or to, you know, it's not me.

The vein of darkness running through Cornelia's work runs through her

family history, too.

Her mother, Irmgard, was German.

Aged just 16 when the Second World War broke out,

she served as a nurse for the Luftwaffe throughout the conflict.

She then spent to years as a prisoner of war after the declaration of peace.

She would never talk about war at all.

You know, she would shudder and not be able to talk about it.

And she, you know, suffered psychologically, I think.

She had a first breakdown I knew of, was aware of,

was when I was about three years old.

I'm sure quite horrible things happened to her during the war.

Did she tell you about them?

No, she didn't. She intimated, you know.

I remember her telling the story about...

erm, having a lovely, beautiful watch.

That had been left to her and I said, "Oh, what happened to it?"

"Have you still got it? She says, "No, no."

And then I asked why and she said, "Oh, I had to...

"I gave it to this American soldier."

I was up a tree and he was attacking me and it was the only thing I could give him

to make him go away, basically.

I think German women after the war were sort of almost game for,

you know, sort of,

Allied troops coming in.

And it was enough to make me realise that there was all kinds of stuff

that she couldn't really talk about.

With little to keep her in post-war Germany, Irmgard made her way to Britain...

..where she soon found work as an au pair

for a family on a Cheshire estate.

It was here that she met Cornelia's father, Frank.

What about the kind of sense that your mother was German, that...

Did you find there was any sense in which you were being victimised for

this at school in any way at all?

Well, yeah. Very definitely, really,

cos I was one of three girls and my sisters were called Alison and Jennifer

and I was called Cornelia,

which is bit more unusual and quite common in Germany

and I think it singled me out at school, you know, that people knew I had a German mother.

Whereas perhaps my sisters didn't.

That escaped people's notice, and so I was quite victimised at school.

A lot of anti-German sentiment - not that long after the war had finished.

So yeah, and I had that feeling throughout my primary school,

you know, that it was a heinous sin that the Germans had committed

and so I kind of absorbed a lot of guilt for that.

It wasn't a comfortable thing to have a German mother,

you know, in rural Britain in the early '60s.

In 2015, Cornelia created a video installation,

reflecting on the human cost of war.

And the sheer number of lives lost.

Filmed in a factory that makes poppies for Remembrance Day,

it's entitled War Machine.

War Machine is created to be shown alongside an immersive installation.

This companion piece was called War Room.

The red card from which the poppy shapes are being stamped,

rather than being thrown away,

Cornelia uses these to drape over the walls and ceilings of this room.

It's as if you're in this weird, red tent.

It's quite disorienting.

Then there is the poignancy of the absence of the flowers.

I mean, these are sheets of card from which the flower shapes have been stamped and,

you know, the obvious question is raised -

where have all the flowers gone?

The idea of the pointlessness of war is conveyed.

With Cornelia Parker, there's no such thing as junk.

She employs a weird and wonderful array of found objects in her practice -

things with a history that she can work with or against.

On a Sunday afternoon stroll down Brick Lane,

Cornelia stumbled across an item that would become a work called Shared Fate.

OK, this is an Oliver doll.

From the 1960s, I think, and I bought in before I loved his grimace on his face.

In the Dickens' story, the grimace's there, I think,

because Fagin is tweaking Oliver's ear.

I've always liked the grimace.

And I kept him for a while not knowing what to do with him and then

I thought he'd be really good for him to share the same fate as Marie Antoinette.

So he's been cut in half using the guillotine that cut-off Marie Antoinette's head.

Really, it's just an excuse for me to run my finger along the blade

of the guillotine.

Shared Fate is part of Cornelia's contribution to a show she's curating this summer,

at London's Foundling Museum.

The museum itself is loaded with a poignant history.

The Foundling Hospital was a place where women would bring their babies

that they couldn't look after.

And the Foundling Hospital would bring them up.

And then they would leave with the child a little signifying object.

You know, something like a coin with something engraved on it,

or a button,

or a piece of fabric.

Because most people were illiterate,

and they would put that with the child's new name and record it in a book,

so if, later on in life,

the mother wanted to come back and claim the child, they could.

And so, these foundling objects, these little tokens,

were very much part of the collection there.

And I just thought, well, we've all got our own little token,

or a little found object.

Cornelia's show at the Foundling Museum is called simply Found.

She's asked over 60 artists,

writers and musicians to respond to the theme.

The exhibition unfolds throughout the building,

interacting with the museum's existing collection.

Cornelia's positioning of Gavin Turk's nomad,

which casts the form of a homeless sleeper in bronze,

is particularly striking.

Feels very pertinent at the moment,

because there are so many refugees.

So I wanted this piece to be in here, in the most ornate room,

just because it's quite baroque in its own right, but...

But underneath this painting, here,

I think it somehow echoes the shape of...

I think it's Pharaoh's daughter, receiving Moses.

She is full of largesse,

and underneath it is this recumbent figure with a very dirty sleeping bag.

The show features work by many of our leading contemporary artists.

We are now unpacking Anthony Gormley's cast iron baby,

which is a cast he took off his daughter Paloma when she was only a few weeks old.

And it's now a cast iron sculpture that weighs about 27 kilos.

I'm being very poignant about this piece, in this context.

Found in an auction sale by artist Jeremy Deller is

the 15-year-old John Lennon's school detention card.

So, he gets detentions for "Not wearing a school cap, "groaning at me,

"silly conduct, talk and foolish remarks..."

And on the other side there's more.

"Nuisance during lesson, very late, late for dinner."

This is about a childhood. A troubled childhood.

But, of course, that... His troubled childhood went on to change the world.

The striking array of art on show is testament to Cornelia's powers

of persuasion.

Her personality and her enthusiasm is obviously very helpful and it opens

doors, and people like her.

So that's why this show is stuffed full of artists,

because everyone just said yes.

Cornelia's back in New York,

to see how her Hitchcock-inspired Met roof installation is progressing.

We can see how the...

The Psycho barn is shaping up.

So, it's pretty exciting because I...

For weeks now, I've been talking to them on the phone and looking

at plans and we've been discussing things in great detail.

But it's really nothing, you know, it...

It's very hard to read plans.

And I just want to be able to see the physical object.

In that window on the second floor, the single one in front.

That's where the woman was first seen.

Let's go inside!

Well, this is it, you know.

It's quite a...

Wow. That's quite something.

And this was all... The materials were all...

This is all used material from the barn.

So it's the red siding off the barn,

and the windows are milled from the wood inside the Barn.

So you can see, you know,

it bears the marks of the structure it had before.

And just like the house in Hitchcock's film,

although Cornelia's sculpture appears three-dimensional, in fact,

it only has two sides.

So, this was exactly the same, and it's all propped up from behind.

Like the original set, so I'm just copying that, really.

It was while she was researching her Psycho barn,

that Cornelia discovered the source of Hitchcock's inspiration for the

infamous house in his film.

It's just across town, in the Museum of modern Art.

Oh, right.

So, there it is.

There it is. It's great, isn't it?

It's a painting by the American artist Edward Hopper,

called House By The Railroad.

This was the key to the whole process, in a way.

But then, it made complete sense,

because this is the angle of the house in the film,

and that's the only angle you see the house from, really.

So... I thought, well, if I make this piece for the roof,

it's got to be skewed on this angle.

And we got the railroad here, and in the film, we've got the motel.

-Yes.

-So it's this horizontal with the vertical of the building.

You can see why Hitchcock went for this,

because there is something dark and mysterious about it, isn't there?

Yeah, it's almost like this... the house has got a story to tell.

Its eyes are... Are closed, as it were, you know, it's...

It's kind of shuttered. And... And melancholic, and...

And unassailable.

You know.

Cornelia's relationship with America goes back a long way.

She first visited New York as a wide-eyed young artist in 1984.

You've just got this adrenaline rush, you know, like you never had before.

Every kind of action was going on in the streets,

there was lots of people living in the park, a lot of drug dealing.

It was quite edgy.

You couldn't really stop and stare too much cos you'd just get mugged.

You really wanted to be invisible so you could just watch

this world go by, cos it was quite extraordinary.

I think I was on this permanent high when I was there.

The excitement was just palpable.

In 1997,

Cornelia delved deeper into American culture when she took up a residency in Texas.

It would prove a life-changing trip.

I really wanted to make a piece of work about something struck by lightning.

So I was looking for some thing struck by lightning,

so I alerted the Fire Brigade,

you know, lightning protection people...

Just kept my ears to the newspapers.

And sure enough, 13 days after I arrived,

there was a church struck by lightning a few miles south of where I was staying.

I drove down to look at the burnt church,

and asked the Minister if I could have the remain... You know,

the charcoal from the church.

And that became the ingredients of a piece of work called Mass.

It was while she was working on Mass that Cornelia first met Texan artist

Jeff McMillan,

who would become her partner in the project.

We really bonded over this long car journey,

and we just ended up in this truck following my friends who were in the

other car in front of us, and we had about a six hour journey.

I hardly knew her when I got in the car, to be honest with you.

And we just had this amazing conversation about art and life and music.

By the end of the journey, I was...

You know, I was a bit smitten already, you know,

cos she was just a fascinating person to know.

We really, we were just very...

In sync, really.

And it...

And... I don't know.

It was just...

Quite wonderful.

And then we built a church together.

We suspended the fragments of a burnt church together.

The work, entitled Mass,

would form part of her Turner prize nomination show later that year.

The best of her work, I think,

is actually really beautiful and it works on this kind of visual,

kind of visceral level.

And that work, at least for the first few years I saw it, it, you know,

when you would come across it, it still had this smell of charred wood, you know.

Which was really potent.

Cheesy!

When Cornelia and Jeff married a year later,

they chose not to do it in the conventional way.

SHE LAUGHS

Rather than a church,

they came to the middle of New York's iconic Brooklyn Bridge.

14th of August, Jeff and I walked 20 minutes up the aisle here

and we got married on this spot.

What about the noise level?

The noise level was much louder as they were resurfacing the bridge.

So we were really having to shout our vows over the traffic noise.

So, why here? Of all the places, why Brooklyn Bridge?

Well, A - we like the bridge.

We love the drama of it all, you know, the kind of...

You know, what it symbolises,

the fact we're both from different continents,

that we are making this big, you know, gesture together.

And Jeff is from Texas, and I'm from England.

So this is the halfway house.

Halfway spot. So we like this.

This is a place where you can just rock up and get married.

Cornelia and Jeff would settle in London

but in 2005 she would return to America

and to the theme of burnt churches

for a much darker companion piece to Mass.

Anti-Mass is also made from the remnants of a burnt church.

But in this case, the reason for its destruction was much more sinister.

The congregation was largely African-American.

And rather than being struck by lightning,

this church was torched by arsonists.

The usually-racist hate crimes, you know,

lots of black congregation churches were burnt down and then...

-By white racists.

-By white racists.

And I just thought... I was completely blown away by that.

So you went and found the arsoned church in Kentucky.

Yeah. Arsoned by bikers...

..Hells Angels who used to ride up on the porch

when there was a service on and intimidate the elderly congregation.

And, you know, drove them out of the church.

They all started to have congregations in their homes

because they were too terrified to use the church,

and then the church was torched.

And that just felt very sad.

The fragments of this church have come from something

which is ideologically horrendous

and continues to this day.

She's shown us a vision of modern America which is quite shocking and

which is really not very known.

So she has exposed a daily reality through something which

at first sight looks very formalist, very beautiful, very elegant,

the way that it floats in space, and that duality, I think,

is absolutely key to her work.

And after the incendiary churches and wedding on Brooklyn Bridge

-comes Lily.

-And then comes Lily, several years later.

No, three years and a day after we got married, Lily appears,

very unheralded. I mean, unplanned.

-Much heralded.

-Not planned?

Not planned. I was 44 when I became pregnant after a rather lax, uh...

-Weekend.

-Weekend. You know,

and Lily, you know, came along and changed our lives.

And what has been absolutely magical and brilliant about having Lily is

I had my childhood, a proper childhood for the first time,

really, one where I could play.

And so she was having her childhood

-and I was having mine at the same time.

-You were having your

-second childhood but one which was the one you should have had in the first place.

-Yes, that's right.

Being a mother, having a child, has that had an impact, do you think,

-on your work?

-Oh, I'm sure.

I mean, I made a particular...

I made a piece at the time I was pregnant when I was absolutely,

you know, fearful that I was going to be a terrible mother and...

And...the way I responded to it,

because I was doing a show in Turin at the time,

and so I was trying to find something to show

in response to the Turin Shroud

and I bought the nightgown that Mia Farrow wore in Rosemary's Baby.

That scary movie.

In Roman Polanski's horror film Rosemary's Baby,

the heroine is tricked into giving birth to the Devil's child.

What have you done to it?

What have you done to its eyes?

He has his father's eyes.

There was a lot of anxiety around my pregnancy,

just because of my age and all the rest of it - nothing untoward

but just, you know, my own fears.

And Rosemary's Baby was all about the birth of the Devil.

So I kind of... When I saw this nightgown,

I was looking for something.

Was it at Sotheby's or something?

Sotheby's auction, yeah, online in New York.

And I thought, "Yes, this is it. I have to have this nightgown."

BABY CRIES

But it was great when I got it,

and then I thought, "Oh, perhaps I'll wear it."

Did you decide against that, did you?

Yes, well, it was far too small.

In fact, Cornelia turned it into a work

for the Gallery Of Modern Art in Turin.

Blue Shift is her response to the Turin Shroud,

turning her anxiety into art.

What did you pay for it, by the way?

Oh, it was about £5,000, something like that.

-Well worth it.

-Yes.

Brought up a Roman Catholic,

the potent imagery of the church Cornelia attended as a child was,

and remains, a powerful influence.

We were sent off to church, me and my elder sister.

I remember going off on the bus

about seven miles to the nearest town

to go to high mass every Sunday.

It was quite heightened, I think, because we had gone on our own,

and we were given money to put in the collection

which we spent on chocolate.

-And so, already...

-I hope you went to confession.

It's such a cliche, the whole Catholic guilt,

but it certainly did play a lot on my mind

that I had committed a mortal sin,

so when confession came round the next week,

I didn't tell them about what I'd done.

I'd just invent something else which was lesser.

So I lied all the way through my childhood in confession

and then bore the weight of the guilt of that.

And when did you lose that faith?

When I was about 14, 15, I started to question things.

I thought, well, if Christ forgives anything,

why is there the concept of Hell?

It all felt very flimsy.

So I gradually lost it.

But I didn't lose all the baggage that was with it, that was...

-sadly remained.

-Well, you say sadly.

That has become very valuable material, really, in your work.

Yeah, I think from living in quite isolated circumstances

in the countryside and then having this vivid experience every week

of the mass and, you know,

the Catholic religion is peppered with overt visual imagery

from the crucifixion to the small relic.

In 1995, Cornelia explored the emotional power of the relic

and the way we invest objects with meaning

in a work called The Maybe.

Part performance, part installation,

The Maybe was a collaboration with the actress Tilda Swinton.

Tilda Swinton is sleeping for a living in a new exhibition

of performance art which has just opened in London.

She's spending eight hours a day in a glass box.

Is it a coffin or an aquarium?

Is she really asleep or just pretending?

Is it art or all pretentious nonsense?

Cornelia surrounded the sleeping Swinton with glass cases

containing relics belonging to prominent figures from history.

Among them, Winston Churchill's half-finished cigar...

..Arthur Askey's suit...

..the rug and cushions from Sigmund Freud's analyst's couch.

Shown over the course of a week,

The Maybe was seen by over 25,000 people.

It's not every day that a sculptor makes the six o'clock news.

But Cornelia would make headlines again in 2003

with a controversial work

created for an exhibition of contemporary art at Tate Britain.

I was curator of the Tate Triennial

and there was a core group of artists immediately

that occurred to me as the ones that I wanted to work with,

and Cornelia was one.

I had no idea what it was she would do.

She had been interested in Rodin's Kiss for a long time.

And then she had an idea of wrapping a mile of string around this couple,

so naked and intimately embracing.

The idea was inspired by one of Cornelia's artist heroes,

the French surrealist Marcel Duchamp.

In 1942, Duchamp mischievously wrapped a mile of string

around a major group show in America,

obscuring the other artists' work.

I quite like quoting other artworks

or flipping them on their head or inverting them in some way.

This piece was called A Kiss, and in brackets, With String Attached.

And this was quite shocking to people.

To use Rodin's The Kiss,

possibly the most famous sculpture in Britain.

Very loved, a much-treasured symbol of passionate romance.

It's part of our cultural landscape.

I think it's an obscenity.

I can't see the point of covering up a work of art.

You can't improve on Rodin.

But some people would go much further than just voicing their disapproval.

So a group of artists calling themselves the Stuckists,

who stuck up for good old-fashioned artistic values,

decided to make what could be described as a terrorist act

in the middle of the Tate Triennial

and with huge scissors, they cut through the string.

You...essentially, I'll put it this way,

you vandalised it...

and then your work was vandalised by the Stuckists.

I know! Rodin must have been a hero to them.

They decided to liberate Rodin's Kiss from me.

So they had a seminar round it

and some guy got a pair of shears out and chopped all the string off.

To which I just tied the string back together

and put it back on the sculpture.

Slightly more punky version.

From maverick interventions

to piles of incinerated cocaine.

From embryo firearms to pornographic drawings.

The range and diversity of Cornelia's work is striking.

But a certain subversive instinct

is always a common theme.

So, Cornelia, I'm looking through your list of collaborators.

The British Army, the Royal Mint,

prison inmates, customs and excise.

-Authority figures.

-Authority figures, yes.

I think I have got a problem, you know, that I was trying to unpick.

In 2015,

Cornelia probed our relationship with authority and the legal system

in a work commissioned to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta,

the document that forms the bedrock of our democracy,

and guarantees all freemen the right to a fair trial.

I just had all these ideas but most of them, you know,

they just didn't work and I spent all this time on Wikipedia.

Thinking, this is far too big a thing, you know,

it's had so many changes, it means all these different things and,

you know, it's this and this and I thought, actually it's all here,

it's all on this page. This is it, what I want to do is to

get this off the machine somehow and make it into a handcrafted thing.

Cornelia decided to recreate the Wikipedia page

in a vast piece of embroidery.

So it suddenly came to me in a bit of a blinding flash

that this is what I wanted to do.

To do so, she called on the sewing skills of people

from all walks of life.

From embroidery guilds...

..to prison inmates.

From journalist Alan Rusbridger, whose blood still marks the cloth...

..to musician Jarvis Cocker,

who contributed the words "Common People".

I started doing "Common"

on the train and I thought, I'm going to make a right hash of this,

"it's a stupid idea" because the train was going like that.

I took my glasses off, held it really close.

I was quite pleased with what I'd got and, in fact,

that turned out much better than

when I actually sat down and took it seriously.

And then, gradually, I started to introduce other...

-Edward Snowden.

-Edward Snowden.

-Jimmy Wales, the inventor of Wikipedia.

-Yes. Julian Assange.

He embroidered the word "freedom".

It seemed quite poignant for him to be doing that when he's...

-He didn't have it.

-He didn't have it, yes.

I wanted prisoners who had been imprisoned for no good reason,

like Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six.

He embroidered the word "Freeman".

Do you see yourself as a political artist in any way?

Yeah, I think... I'm increasingly more political, I think,

as I get older, because...

I see injustices more and more.

And so, although my work is not overtly political,

I think there's obviously some kind of politics in there.

Politics are very important to Cornelia.

She has very strong political opinions but the great thing is

that her work is not didactic. It's informed by those politics.

You can read those politics in between the lines of her work,

they insinuate themselves

and, arguably, she is more effective as an artist,

communicating political ideas

because she's not hitting you over the head with them.

Back in New York,

it's been over a year since Cornelia was first invited to create

an installation for the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But her PsychoBarn is finally ready for an unsuspecting public.

SHE SCREAMS

PSYCHO THEME PLAYS

Replicating the house in Hitchcock's film,

using reclaimed wood from a traditional American red barn,

Cornelia's piece cleverly combines the cosy and the malign.

-Hi, Alan.

-Hi.

-How are you?

-Good.

-I'm reading all about you...

-Great.

-..in the New York Times.

I'm so pleased.

So, I must say, I think it's really worked out really well.

And also, I love the angle.

I think just trying to insert

another building into the skyline of New York.

Perhaps a little worrisome thought.

They say every city skyline tells a story.

The towering jungle of New York speaks of a city that has grown fast

and matured quickly.

Cornelia's PsychoBarn takes us back...

..through American culture

and art, and history...

..to the nation's earliest roots

with the first European settlers.

In merging their hopeful optimism

with Hitchcock's dark vision...

..Cornelia strikes at the heart of America's collective memory,

its wholesome foundation myth.

There's a tragicomic element to this, I think,

that it's got that familiarity of the red barn

which makes you feel happy

and then there's this dark undertow of what it is,

it's not really a building, it's a facade,

and it looks a bit melancholy

and you don't know what's going on inside it.

Then when you walk round the back

you realise there's nothing inside it, it's just a facade.

The PsychoBarn seems to have touched a nerve.

Within minutes of its official opening,

images are flooding the internet.

It's always difficult for us to take outsiders being critical of our past

but maybe only outsiders can do that.

Maybe only an outsider can actually look at that American history

and see the paradox in it,

and the conflicts and the dark side.

I think it's a very, very extraordinary work of art.

MUSIC: Theme from New York, New York performed by Frank Sinatra

Cornelia Parker is original and fearless and fun.

And I, for one, can't wait to see what she does next.

# Start spreadin' the news

# I'm leavin' today

# I want to be a part of it

# New York, New York

# These vagabond shoes are longing to stray

# Right through the very heart of it

# New York, New York... #