Cornelia Parker - Quotes

My work is somehow very quiet and not really violent at all - it's calm, like the eye of the storm.
Parker, Cornelia.

I’m fascinated by man and nature. For me, the edge of the land has always been defined by a gun.
Parker, Cornelia.

My art is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration: an exploration of the secret lives of objects and materials, both strange.
Parker, Cornelia.

I like to take man-made objects and push them to the point where they almost lose their reference, so that they become something else, take on other alliances.
Parker, Cornelia.

The Kiss (by Rodin) used to be considered indecent. People thought it should be covered up, which in effect is what I've done. I don't think I have hidden the eroticism. If you conceal things, they become more charged.
Parker, Cornelia.

I like the life/death resurrection bit, which is very catholic, something dies, but it's resurrected in another form.
Parker, Cornelia.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That's what you hope an artwork to be – a constantly living thing.
Parker, Cornelia.

I don't want it all to be pretty – it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.
Parker, Cornelia.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable – you're this renegade thing.
Parker, Cornelia.

I resurrect things that have been killed off… My work is all about the potential of materials - even when it looks like they’ve lost all possibilities.
Parker, Cornelia.

The brass band is part of a robustness we used to have,” says Parker. “Related to the unions, the British Legion, the Salvation Army – an anthem that is slowly winding down. So the instruments in my piece are permanently inhaled. They’ve literally had the wind taken out of them.
Parker, Cornelia and Mark Hudson (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010.

There’s a great sense of irony in the North. The brass band community’s got quite a sense of humour. I reckon the North can take it.
Parker, Cornelia and Mark Hudson (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010.

There’s a lot of violence in the making of these things, but a quiet aftermath. I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become clichés, like the shed, a traditional place of rest and retreat, and I give them a more incandescent future. Explosions are very familiar from films and the news, but how many of us have seen one or even touched a piece of the debris?
Parker, Cornelia and Mark Hudson (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010.

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.
Parker, Cornelia and Mark Hudson (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010.

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.
Parker, Cornelia and Mark Hudson (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Telegraph. June 24, 2010.

There's nothing like a 9-metre-long phallic object, is there? Hehehehhe!
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

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.
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

I remember trying to paint light coming in through a window and being very frustrated by it. I thought: I don't want to depict something, I want it to be the real thing.
Hattenstone, Simon."Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it. I just make it first and then it becomes much clearer to me why.
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer)."Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

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.
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

I was technically very bad, always destroying things by mistake, tripping over things, breaking them, so in a way it evolved into all this.
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

It's a hunch. You get a little feeling at the back of your neck . . . ooh, this is something I want to pursue, and then you end up with a 9-metre-long gun before you know it, and you think shee-it, how did that happen?
Parker, Cornelia and Simon Hattenstone (Interviewer). "Cornelia Parker: a History of Violence." in: The Guardian. May 25, 2010.

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.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Later." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

I found myself reading Noam Chomsky. Cutting through the noisy fug and disinformation of Bush's America, Chomsky's voice emerged as a beacon of clarity.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Later." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

I had worried that an interview with Chomsky might be dry, but in the end it turned out to be emotive and compelling. I also realised that I was drawing on a sense of apocalypse - death and resurrection - that was always there in my previous work.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Later." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

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.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Later." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

There are other things art can do. It can imagine the unimaginable.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Now." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

Artists can bear witness. We are free radicals in a way that scientists can never be. Humanity may be on the brink of disaster, but this could be an exciting, creative period, with everyone - Philosophers, Artists, Politicians, Bus Drivers - doing everything they can to avert it.
Parker, Cornelia. "Apocalypse Now." in: The Guardian. February 12, 2008.

My show will be like a shanty camp of these veils making moiré patterns. They were camouflaged army tents but there’s almost nothing to them now. Last year both my parents died so the funereal feel has come from that, although normally I try to keep emotional baggage out of my work.
Parker, Cornelia and Ossian Ward. "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Time Out. March 5, 2008.

I don’t set up large works like the blown-up shed here because I prefer to make quick decisions in the gallery, rather than prevaricate over the permutations. A lot get’s planned on the kitchen table, I like to make work into play.
Parker, Cornelia and Ossian Ward. "Cornelia Parker Interview." in: Time Out. March 5, 2008.

LT:What made you want to be an artist, what did you think that was? CP: I think it was freedom, the idea of being the most liberating thing you could do.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

I had a very physical upbringing. It was almost a peasant existence, working on a smallholding and living in a tied cottage. I was involved in very repetitive tasks like milking cows, planting, scything hay, stringing up tomatoes ... play was something I had to sneak off and do. And I think art seemed to be almost like grown-up play, something that was about freedom of ideas, freedom of expression, and something I could imagine myself doing.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

But also you can break the rules, because you have to do certain things to grow tomatoes, but I didn't have to follow those kinds of rules in art. I felt - naively - that art was something without rules, but of course you impose your own.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

Every bit of the process is there, and I like that; I like people seeing the journey you've made.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

My father was a bad carpenter and would make shanty-ish outhouses out of bits of other stuff, and so the idea of improvisation was very much part of my upbringing.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

I was also very interested in Edward de Bono's book Lateral Thinking, which I read when I was about eighteen. He talks about holes. He says that to be an expert you have to dig a very deep hole, but that if you do this it's difficult to get out of it and look around; to dig a different hole would be almost impossible for an expert. Thinking laterally means thinking creatively, rather than just learning the contents of an existing hole. So you dig lots of holes that could become connected and that way you might discover something new.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

> One of the things that lured me into art was the attraction of another kind of space, a space of vision and creativity. It seemed a very enriching world to me, and that was the world I wanted to be in, rather than in the drudgery of peasant farming which is where I come from. As soon as I gravitated towards Sculpture I found my spiritual home.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

I very much resisted, in the past, having my work written about under the umbrella of women's issues or women's rights, because I really wanted to be part of the mainstream, and also, I'd always ignored the fact that I was a woman, probably because it was ignored when I was a child. I was brought up as a surrogate son.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.

Actually, I think it's obvious that my work's made by a woman, when you look at the form and sensibility of it, but it's not something I want consciously to mine.
Parker, Cornelia and Lisa Tickner (Interviewer) and Gillian Perry (Editor). "A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker." in: Difference and excess in contemporary art: the visibility of women's practice. April 16, 2004. Paperback,183 pages, ISBN: 1405112026.