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All Quotes by author - 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Art and creativity are crucial, whether you're a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist. "

" Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car - you always know how to drive even though you're not analysing how. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" As you get older, things don't work as well. I do Pilates, and that helps. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Dust, in the end, settles on everything. "

" 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. "

" I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be. "

" 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. "

" I am 5ft 10in. I got my height from my dad, who was very rangy. I like being tall. "

" I am interested in the press and what they do. "

" 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 can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw 'Tom and Jerry' films or Charlie Chaplin in 'Modern Times.' That's true. "

" I definitely didn't want children, because my childhood was not a very happy time. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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