I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn't really done any introduction courses in sculpture... I'd missed all the technical stuff. I didn't really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I'd sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.
— Cornelia Parker
I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.
I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.
I don't want to feel like an ambulance chaser, but very often, when I hear about a fire, my first instinct is to make a piece of art out of it.
I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn't see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.
What was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don't need. Perhaps this is one thing art can do: create a new aesthetic, one of austerity.
A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.
I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray's 'Dust Breeding,' his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called 'Large Glass.' It looked like an aerial photograph or a view through a microscope.
As you get older, things don't work as well. I do Pilates, and that helps.
Art and creativity are crucial, whether you're a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist.
As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.
Who thought it would be a good idea to undermine art in the school curriculum? Who thought studying the history of our visual culture was a waste of time? Who thought that only private schools should have that privilege? Was it someone who said we don't need experts?
I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.
I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become cliches - like the shed, a traditional place of rest and retreat - and I give them a more incandescent future.
At my degree show, someone said, 'It's nice, but it's very feminine.' I said, thank you, taking it as a compliment, but they obviously meant it as an insult.
Being a sculptor who uses found objects, all the objects I use in my work have been designed by other people. So I'm tweaking them in some way by squashing them or throwing them off cliffs! Then I formalise my damage by suspending them or arranging them in some kind of way. So I'm using other people's design in a way, so I'm an 'un-maker.'
I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.
I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.
The idea of going off to an office every day and 'putting on my art hat' doesn't appeal.
I do think there is a link between the accidental art the sciences produce and the deliberate art the artist creates, but I can't help feeling that the innocence of the accidental art of science has a power and curious beauty that artists are hard-pressed to match.
I don't drive for pleasure. It's purely to get from A to B.
I can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw 'Tom and Jerry' films or Charlie Chaplin in 'Modern Times.' That's true.
My father wanted a boy badly and didn't get one, so I was happy to be the surrogate boy. I was very strong, always doing manual labour.
I am 5ft 10in. I got my height from my dad, who was very rangy. I like being tall.
I don't mind getting older; I just don't want to be in pain.
I didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.
Our cultural industries are our biggest export, our biggest manufacturing base. Every pound spent on art education brings disproportionately large returns. It's the biggest bang for our buck. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, the more you put in, the greater the successes for the U.K. economy.
My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.
I was selling bric-a-brac in Portobello and Camden Market. I love objects. But I was embarrassed by the idea of collecting, so I began using these things in my art.
I think it's quite obvious my work is made by a woman, because I have never wanted to make anything that is not ephemeral. But I definitely want to be thought of as an artist first.
There's only a couple of coffee cups I'll use, because I like the way they feel in my hand. I realise I've got lots of others, but I won't use them because I just don't like... the thickness of the ceramic is too much, or the glaze isn't right.
I think design means, for me, almost when man, back in time, decided to do something conscious. You know... to shape something and make something different from just using things that were lying around. So whoever designed the wheel were onto a good thing.
I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.
I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.
Some people separate their work and home lives, but I love the idea of having my studio and house in the same space.
Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.
I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension but, hopefully, one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation.
I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.
Dust, in the end, settles on everything.
I have always had a bob haircut because my hair is so fine and doesn't like being long.
I'm trying not to go through that midlife dip that artists tend to have.
I was very physical as a child - we lived on a smallholding, and I was always outside making mud pies or building structures up trees.
If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?
Product design is fed by the avant-garde.
My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.
I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.
Design impacts me in everything I do. Because, as I say, everything I own is designed. So the building I live in, the objects I choose to boil water in for example, even drinking vessels.
