“My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“If I was prime minister, I would declare a state of emergency on climate change.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t mind getting older; I just don’t want to be in pain.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Product design is fed by the avant-garde.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.’”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Some people separate their work and home lives, but I love the idea of having my studio and house in the same space.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I’m from a working-class background – I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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?”
― Cornelia Parker
“If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I didn’t make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Art and creativity are crucial, whether you’re a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I’m trying not to go through that midlife dip that artists tend to have.”
― Cornelia Parker
“As you get older, things don’t work as well. I do Pilates, and that helps.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I have always had a bob haircut because my hair is so fine and doesn’t like being long.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I am 5ft 10in. I got my height from my dad, who was very rangy. I like being tall.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Dust, in the end, settles on everything.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw ‘Tom and Jerry’ films or Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times.’ That’s true.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t drive for pleasure. It’s purely to get from A to B.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I’m sure he’d be a very interesting person to share a journey with.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“The idea of going off to an office every day and ‘putting on my art hat’ doesn’t appeal.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.”
― 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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t read the art mags. I read the newspapers.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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
“Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing – I grew up thinking that Armageddon was just around the corner – now I know it is, with global warming and all. I can keep it at bay by doing the work. It’s a sort of reverse sympathetic magic. I’m always doing it so it doesn’t happen to me.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.”
― Cornelia Parker
“My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“At times, I’ve been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I need eight hours of sleep, but I never get it except at weekends.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I do 10 minutes of Pilates every morning if I’m in the mood.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t skip meals, because I get blood sugary.”
― Cornelia Parker
“My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator’s job.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I definitely didn’t want children, because my childhood was not a very happy time.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Beauty is too easy. Often in my work, I take beautiful objects and do extreme things to them so that they are overlaid with something a bit more sinister and violent.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I like the idea of taking three-dimensional objects and making them two-dimensional so that they look like cartoons.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I don’t particularly look at other artists when I’m working. But references do come into my work intuitively.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car – you always know how to drive even though you’re not analysing how.”
― Cornelia Parker
“That’s the problem with working and living in the same space – my studio is downstairs, so I often get distracted by domestic things.”
― Cornelia Parker
“The best ideas come out of getting lost.”
― Cornelia Parker
“When people listen to music, they don’t worry about what it means like they do about art. Everyone’s an expert on music, but with art, I always find I have to defend its existence.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I’m not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I am interested in the press and what they do.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Traditional conceptual art is very dry.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.”
― Cornelia Parker
“My mother was German, and I was brought up with ‘Struwwelpeter’ stories, which are invested with all sorts of horrors waiting for you if you do the wrong thing.”
― Cornelia Parker
“After leaving college, I was in a show called Sculpture by Women where I was asked to talk about my history of victimisation in art, and I genuinely didn’t think I had been victimised. Although I obviously believe in a lot of the feminist aspirations, I was wary about being dragged down by the politics of it.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I think I was a late developer because I’d been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don’t think.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I was my father’s sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.”
― Cornelia Parker
“You only get one life, so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do.”
― Cornelia Parker
“If people say, ‘You can’t do that,’ you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.”
― Cornelia Parker
“If you conceal things, they become more charged.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.”
― Cornelia Parker
“To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“If I’m not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Artists and scientists are very close. They always have been, but I think we’ve just been divided out over the last few centuries into specialisms. Leonardo da Vinci was drawing helicopters and all kinds of things. We’re artificially divided. I think we’re closer than we think we are.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They’ve got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.”
― Cornelia Parker
“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.”
― Cornelia Parker
“If you cut art from school, you’re going to have a lot more looted shops.”
― Cornelia Parker
“Living in a warehouse is great – but after a while, you just want a garden.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family’s smallholding.”
― Cornelia Parker
“I always love the court fool in Shakespearean times, in Henry VIII’s time. The fool can say all kinds of stuff that the other people can’t say, so I’m hoping I might take that role.”
― Cornelia Parker
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