One of the devices used by artist Cornelia Parker is to subject familiar everyday objects to extremes of temperature, pressure or force. The resulting transformations retain a residual trace of their original form and seem to invite the viewer to reconsider their own relationship with history and mortality.

For the suite of map works called ‘Meteorite Lands in the Middle of Nowhere: The American Series’ Parker heated a tiny meteorite and carefully scorched six selected place names in the USA on as many maps. Some of Parker’s meteorites make direct hits, others are near misses, but the associative power of the place names she has chosen is self-evident: Bagdad, Louisiana, Paris, Texas, and Bethlehem, North Carolina, are all hits; Roswell, New Mexico, Waco, Texas, and Truth or Consequences, also New Mexico, are all misses. In another series Parker has meteorites landing on sites in London.

The work plays with the almost obsessive place meteorites now have in the popular imagination, given their potential capacity to completely annihilate the earth. Parker suggests that by displacing fear onto this external threat, meteors distract humanity from the dangers it poses to itself.