Cornelia Parker Quotes

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

I think we have made progress. There's no doubt about it, we have moved forward. But there's some essential, core thing that has not been deconstructed. And I'm telling you, it's connected to the body. I know it is.

I'm an ice sculptor. Last night I made a cube.

A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.

A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle.

In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all - that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas.

I use all sorts of things to work with: old brooms, old sweaters, and all kinds of peculiar tools and materials... I paint to excite myself, and make something for myself.

Things that came apart could be put together again, but never exactly the same.

I took the pieces you threw away, put them together by night and day. Washed by the rain. Dried by the sun. A million pieces all in one.

As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.

The statue lies hid in a block of marble; and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter, and removes the rubbish.

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

Education lays hold of what is best in a person, but character lays hold of what is worse. It takes hold of a failing and by very skillful manipulation and training turns it into a perfection.

I'm interested in taking a form, breaking it apart, and then rebuilding it. It is about transformation for me...it is a very core notion that stabilizes my practice.

Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.

The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.

What molds us is what maims us.

Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm.

You can turn a giant into a mouse just by getting him fatigued. That was my whole game plan.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde; the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.