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" 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

Mother

People

She

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

" 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. "

" The best ideas come out of getting lost. "

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

" 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

Artist

Think

" 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 don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Cornelia Parker

Things

You

" 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

Beauty

Work

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

" 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. "

" 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

Say

Water

" 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 was my father's sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character. "

Cornelia Parker

Way

Father

" I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn. "

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

Cornelia Parker

Really

Strategic

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car - you always know how to drive even though you're not analysing how.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

" 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. "

" 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 want to make work that reflects different times and processes. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "