A biography for Cornelia Parkerhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“Product design is fed by the avant-garde.”
“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.”
“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 am interested in the press and what they do.”
“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.”
“The best ideas come out of getting lost.”
“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 have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think.”
“Traditional conceptual art is very dry.”
“I need eight hours of sleep, but I never get it except at weekends.”
“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.”
“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 don't drive for pleasure. It's purely to get from A to B.”
“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 always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.”
“I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.”
“I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.”
“If you conceal things, they become more charged.”