Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.
I can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw 'Tom and Jerry' films or Charlie Chaplin in 'Modern Times.' That's true.
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 was very physical as a child - we lived on a smallholding, and I was always outside making mud pies or building structures up trees.
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.
Cry down materialism all you will, surely one of the thoroughly satisfactory sensations of this world is to feel financially independent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.
When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'You always want to be different.' I couldn't work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.
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.
Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.
I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.
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.
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.
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.
My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.
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.
... rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.
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.
There's only a certain amount of works you can make, so you have to make only the ones you really want to make. It's all about trying to be as productive as possible.
There's something about being in the country that makes you stick out like a sore thumb ? you're an anomaly. But in London there's always someone wilder and woollier.
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.
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.
Trout fishing is like any other sport. It is waste of words to try to give anyone who has never tried it any idea of what it means to land a five-pound trout on a gossamer leader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't have to have angst to be an artist, but it's grist to the mill. If you want to explore the whole emotional spectrum in your work, it helps to have experienced intense emotions.
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.
I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.
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.
Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.
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.
I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray's 'Dust Breeding,' his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called 'Large Glass.' It looked like an aerial photograph or a view through a microscope.
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've done some collaborations which have ended up like Chinese whispers, but the most successful was with Tilda Swinton... Together we transcended our previous work and made something better together than we could have done apart.
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.
Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heaven grants the human being who has learned to live alone a deep measure of such rewards that verily would one hesitate to sacrifice such proved satisfactions, such rare unending possibilities of contentment for anything less than certainty more certain still.
When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.
I do think there is a link between the accidental art the sciences produce and the deliberate art the artist creates, but I can't help feeling that the innocence of the accidental art of science has a power and curious beauty that artists are hard-pressed to match.