Who thought it would be a good idea to undermine art in the school curriculum? Who thought studying the history of our visual culture was a waste of time? Who thought that only private schools should have that privilege? Was it someone who said we don't need experts?

Cornelia Parker

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

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.

Cornelia Parker

Pet Way Use

I have always had a bob haircut because my hair is so fine and doesn't like being long.

Cornelia Parker

Ways Way Use

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.

Cornelia Parker

Work Where Want

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

Cornelia Parker

Relationship Life World

I don't skip meals, because I get blood sugary.

Cornelia Parker

Use Us T

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.

Cornelia Parker

Work Death Art

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

Cornelia Parker

Way Very T

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.

Cornelia Parker

Car Art Way

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.

Cornelia Parker

Love Art Using

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

Cornelia Parker

Work Space Working

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

Cornelia Parker

Who Very Tall

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Cornelia Parker

Very Us Thing

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

Cornelia Parker

Art Very Traditional

I don't mind getting older; I just don't want to be in pain.

Cornelia Parker

Want Us Tin

I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn't see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.

Cornelia Parker

Car Wit Well

Violence is part of everybody's life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilises all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I'd rather it be out than in.

Cornelia Parker

Work Life Art

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.

Cornelia Parker

Work Good Fear

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

Cornelia Parker

Life Art Yin

My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.

Cornelia Parker

Way Very T

At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.

Cornelia Parker

Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.

Cornelia Parker

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

When people listen to music, they don't worry about what it means like they do about art. Everyone's an expert on music, but with art, I always find I have to defend its existence.

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.

Cornelia Parker

If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?

Cornelia Parker

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

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

After leaving college, I was in a show called Sculpture by Women where I was asked to talk about my history of victimisation in art, and I genuinely didn't think I had been victimised. Although I obviously believe in a lot of the feminist aspirations, I was wary about being dragged down by the politics of it.

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

Product design is fed by the avant-garde.

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

Being a sculptor who uses found objects, all the objects I use in my work have been designed by other people. So I'm tweaking them in some way by squashing them or throwing them off cliffs! Then I formalise my damage by suspending them or arranging them in some kind of way. So I'm using other people's design in a way, so I'm an 'un-maker.'

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

I think it's quite obvious my work is made by a woman, because I have never wanted to make anything that is not ephemeral. But I definitely want to be thought of as an artist first.

Cornelia Parker

I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become cliches - like the shed, a traditional place of rest and retreat - and I give them a more incandescent future.

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

Who thought it would be a good idea to undermine art in the school curriculum? Who thought studying the history of our visual culture was a waste of time? Who thought that only private schools should have that privilege? Was it someone who said we don't need experts?

Cornelia Parker

Our cultural industries are our biggest export, our biggest manufacturing base. Every pound spent on art education brings disproportionately large returns. It's the biggest bang for our buck. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, the more you put in, the greater the successes for the U.K. economy.

Cornelia Parker

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.

Cornelia Parker

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

I didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.

Cornelia Parker