Old cars headed for the scrap heap were John Chamberlain's art supplies. But everything mechanical about this work—an old car having been crushed up like a ball of paper, and the fact that it was originally an old car at all—all that falls away from the monumental lightness, the way rusted, scratched-up steel is elegantly folded onto itself like a curling fern, like an embryo, like a delicate egg waiting to be born again as something wholly new. This is rebirth indeed, elegance and a hovering sense of potential miraculously wrought from the most unlikely, seemingly unusable material.

More: read about an unexpected photograph of John Chamberlain here.

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