Top 50 Cornelia Parker Quotes

I do 10 minutes of Pilates every morning if I’m in the mood.

I like the idea of taking three-dimensional objects and making them two-dimensional so that they look like cartoons.

At times, I’ve been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

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.

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.

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.

If I was prime minister, I would declare a state of emergency on climate change.

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.

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.

Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.

I don’t drive for pleasure. It’s purely to get from A to B.

Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They’ve got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.

I am interested in the press and what they do.

I was my father’s sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.

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.

That’s the problem with working and living in the same space – my studio is downstairs, so I often get distracted by domestic things.

When I was a kid, my mother used to say, ‘You always want to be different.’ I couldn’t work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.

If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?

If you conceal things, they become more charged.

I try to avoid the ‘art world’ as much as possible. It’s too much about fads and fashions – who’s getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

If I’m not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill.

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.

Violence is part of everybody’s life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilises all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I’d rather it be out than in.

A lot of my stuff just wasn’t saleable. I still don’t do private or corporate commissions. It becomes like interior design. I don’t enjoy it. The process makes me feel physically sick.

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 don’t mind getting older; I just don’t want to be in pain.

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?

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.

My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.

I didn’t make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.

My mother became mentally unwell with schizophrenia when I was in my teens… We couldn’t watch television because she thought the people on TV were sending her messages. She thought there were hidden cameras everywhere, so we had to have the curtains drawn.

I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.

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 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’m not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.

People often want the big dramatic works, not the smaller quieter ones, but I don’t worry about how it fits together anymore; I just have to do it. I feel compelled to make a work: it’s like an itch I have to scratch, and once it’s been scratched, it goes away.

I think I’m a feminist, hopefully by example. I just feel it’s important to do as much as I can as a woman, to the best of my ability.

You don’t have to have angst to be an artist, but it’s grist to the mill. If you want to explore the whole emotional spectrum in your work, it helps to have experienced intense emotions.

Driving a steamroller over an old trumpet or a teaspoon is no more destructive than taking a chisel to a lump of marble already torn from the landscape. But people don’t see it that way because marble is considered noble.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

The idea of going off to an office every day and ‘putting on my art hat’ doesn’t appeal.

I need eight hours of sleep, but I never get it except at weekends.

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.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I’m sure he’d be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

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.

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.

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.

My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.

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 feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.