Artist Evelyn Rosenberg invented a remarkable technique to make sculpture by forming metal with plastic explosives. After many months of experiments in the mid-1980s with an Israeli explosives engineer, she discovered how to refine this unique process to make large-scale, intricately designed works of art and named the new art form Detonography. Working in the New Mexico desert, near where the first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity Site, she transforms powerful weapons of destruction into tools of creation.

In this book, the first to showcase her work, she describes the history and...