Artist of destruction honoured by Prince

The Turner Prize-nominated sculptor is best known for blowing up, shooting or crushing everyday objects in a series of works.

Parker, 54, received her award during a Buckingham Palace investiture ceremony from Prince Charles, who is a keen amateur watercolourist.

She joked about the OBE award saying: "It's a dilemma about whether you're going to accept it – as an artist you're supposed to be iconoclastic, but I thought why not.

"Especially as I've done a lot of work with medals in the past so you never know it might end up in an art work."

One of her best known works is the large-scale creation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, where the Army blew-up a garden shed and she suspended the fragments around a light source.

In Wedding Ring Drawing the gold band was drawn out into a very fine thread and the same process was applied in Bullet Drawings made from lead bullets turned into wire.

Describing her inspiration, the sculptor, said: "I'm very clumsy and I was always destroying things by mistake and I thought this destruction is very much a part of everything – there's life, death and it all moves on."