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" 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. "

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" 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

True

Say

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

Cornelia Parker

Art

Drawing

" My iPhone has always been my sketchbook. "

" You only get one life, so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Cornelia Parker

Really

Strategic

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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 have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think. "

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

" 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. "

" If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it. "

" 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. "

" 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

Feel

Enjoy

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

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

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

Cornelia Parker

Idea

Look

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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