Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Thinking

Work

" 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. "

" Traditional conceptual art is very dry. "

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

Cornelia Parker

Reaction

Always

" 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

Mars

Something

" 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. "

" Product design is fed by the avant-garde. "

" 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. "

" I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art. "

Cornelia Parker

Art

Drawing

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

" I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you cut art from school, you're going to have a lot more looted shops. "

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

Cornelia Parker

Press

Interested

" 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. "

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

" I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively. "

" 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. "

" If you conceal things, they become more charged. "

Cornelia Parker

Things

You

" 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. "

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

Cornelia Parker

Interesting

Journey

" 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

Always

Artist

" 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. "

" 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 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

Child

Mud

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

" I'm trying not to go through that midlife dip that artists tend to have. "

" I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school. "