Bang Bang Bang! It’s not just that forehead fringe that’s dynamite. Cornelia Parker has incorporated explosions into her work since she was turned down by all the big art schools in England and turned failure into her new M.O. 

Apparently, it runs in the family. Parker’s dad never dated a girl until he was 34 and met her mother, who herself was still shaken from the psychological backlash of a nursing job in the ranks of Nazi Germany. At first, Parker was just accidentally terrible at technical work. Now, she embraces it. 

She tossed the painting career, along with a bevy of antiques off the Cliffs of Dover, thrown over for the sake of art. Obsessed with Tom and Jerry-style deaths, she went full out for the guns-blazing, bombs-bursting lifestyle. This meant going straight to the explosives source- the British Army. Parker casually asked them to detonate a garden shed for her and, for some reason, they graciously cooperated.  

Since then, Parker’s been busy indulging her inner demons. She’s been exploding, steamrolling and pulverizing everything within reach, cackling at her own stunts. Her love of the combustible may have even influenced her choice of husband, a real-deal Texan artist (whose gun-slinging must have been part of winning her heart).

Ever the trouble maker, she once borrowed a roomful of Turner watercolors from a major museum to put on a show of just the backs of the paintings. Afterwards, she even got the museum to file them all under her own name instead of the original artist's.

There might be more to that inner demon thing, too. During her pregnancy with her daughter, Parker bought the nightgown worn by Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby and was prepared to don it for her own bloody birth. Alas, she reports, just a couple sizes too small!