Cornelia Parker What Do Artists Do All Day?

WHAT DO ARTISTS DO ALL DAY? FKR A294E/02 BRD000000

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I never know really what I'm doing.

I have a little inkling of where to start

and I'll know when something is finished,

but along the way there are lots of diversions and dips and weaves.

I see things in the world which are just quite ordinary

but then they become extraordinary, the more you look at them.

The craft, if there is such a thing as craft in my work,

is about looking, it is about arranging materials,

it is about titling something.

It is about re-presenting it.

I feel I've been an artist always,

but, you know, it doesn't mean my art is any good!

I've never really been that studio-orientated.

I'm always much more happy being out and about.

I'm a bit of a grasshopper so I'm not really doing one thing all day.

There's always lots of little things happening.

So today is very chaotic. I've got quite a few things to do.

I've got a show coming up so I've kind of got to finish lots of things off.

I realise a lot of my work over the last year or so

has been about the streets, because that is where I am most of the time.

You start to hone in on certain things, then they become a bit

of an obsession and then I usually have to do something about them!

Thank God I'm an artist.

I'm going to stop now

and take a quick photo of something I've been eyeing up for a while.

Where is it?

It's there. I'm just going to pull over and take a quick iPhone pic.

I love urban spaces.

I was born in the countryside and I was pretty phobic about

urban spaces for a long time, but now I live in London

which I have since 1984, I don't think I could ever leave it.

I mean, it's just continually throwing up stuff that I love.

What I love about this sign is it says, "Stop." Somewhat urgently.

But because the sign is so old and it's getting so decrepit now,

it feels like this urgent word has weathered with age

and I really like the contradiction of that.

If I make an image of this,

what I would do is get rid of all the other words around it and just have

the word "Stop" in a black background,

with all the ageing round it. So it is an aged stop!

I like using found objects because they are familiar, everybody

knows what they are and they are part of the world that we all inhabit.

I take things that are ubiquitous and familiar and tweak them in some way.

Or just point something out about them.

In 1991, I made a piece called Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View,

and I used that title to describe a piece which was a garden shed

that I assembled in a gallery full of objects, and then

I asked the British Army to blow up the shed for me which they did!

EXPLOSION

The shed seems like the place full of baggage.

I like the fact that it is again, it is ubiquitous. It is a depository.

I spent my childhood working hard on a smallholding,

doing many hours of hard graft, from milking cows by hand,

mucking out pigs, doing rhythmic tasks, doing monotonous tasks,

and I think that choreography is still there in my work.

My parents weren't keen at all on me pursuing art.

I left home and went to Wolverhampton Poly.

Wolverhampton was a gritty, urban space.

It had Anti-Nazi League rallies, racism,

you know, urban blight.

My aesthetic changed.

I began to look at decay

as something that could possibly have some value in the world.

I like playing a lot with the idea of abstraction and representation,

so there's a lot of looking.

And it's part of a battery of electric shocks that build up

into something that can spark into something that becomes a work.

I think with cracks,

the obsession with cracks is almost like a childhood thing.

And now I'm a mum and I've got an 11-year-old, for years I was

walking my daughter to school and we would play don't step on the cracks.

You're filling all the cracks in that I'm interested in,

these have been here for a long time. Now you have filled them in.

-This is terrible.

-Everyday we fix this road, the council no helping.

This is a rubbish road.

Never mind.

-Thank you!

-Bye!

Very often I get my best ideas walking down the street

or in conversation.

You know, those everyday conversations that I might have.

Somehow it throws you into a different gear.

The cracks that I had got to know so well

over these years of walking Lily to school,

I have decided to almost deify them, you know, make them into an object.

So I have made a rubber mould of the cracks

and I am having those cast in bronze.

So these are the last three sections we've got to pour.

-They are scheduled to pour on Thursday.

-Wow!

They don't look anything like my cracks!

-They look like trees or something.

-Absolutely.

'For me, process is incredibly important.

'I think the materials are important, the process is important

'and it is a combination of what those two things together make the work.

'The material is important in this piece and it's gone through

'a process already which is done by experts, not by me.

'But I think the work is just a record of those two things really.'

Ah, wow. It's amazing!

For the first half of my degree I was doing painting

and because of that I missed some of the induction courses in sculpture.

So I didn't learn those sculptural techniques whether they be welding

or modelling in clay or carving, anything traditional.

I'm watching an aluminium pour. It's great. It looks like silver.

It's giving me ideas.

I think that really helped me in a way,

it liberated me from technique, that I've always in the last few

years harnessed technique that's out there in the world.

If I want to cast something in bronze I'll use a bronze foundry,

or if I want to use a steam roller, I'll employ a steam roller driver.

If I want to throw things off cliffs, I just throw them myself!

He's going to be working on your piece.

So we are the early stages obviously at the moment.

Most of the castings are now actually in metal.

Obviously in sections, so we are casting it obviously in sections.

So we have been working on removing the shell, removing the feeders.

At the moment obviously they are still raw castings

if you like, we've still got to do all the fixings etc.

Looks very exciting!

Cornelia's deadline really is the end of this month,

so at the moment we've got the vast majority of bits cast in bronze,

sections have been cleaned off and they are now being prepared

for the point where they are going to be joined

and assembled and final fixings.

So I like this, because the lumpy bit is where the soil was

of the crack, so the liquid fills right down to the earth's surface,

and then that's a bit of a chip out of the paving stone.

And that's why it's got a flat surface.

These smooth bits are to do with bits missing from the stone, yes.

So it's a bit of nature and a bit of man!

This is really getting very wonderful to see it in a tangible object.

Something that was just a crack has now become an object.

It is giving birth to an object, with help from experts.

LAUGHTER

I love coming to these kind of places,

because they have expertise that I haven't got.

I realise everything is a step-by-step process,

it all edges me closer to what I want. So it is good.

In Thirty Pieces Of Silver,

I used a steam roller and I laid

all these objects out on the path,

and I got the steam roller

to run over everything.

All the silver objects

that I had bought from various places

were united in one death.

So I picked up all the debris

and suspended it in 30 pools.

And then, the piece, which looked like waterlilies

hovering above the ground became like a natural object.

-RADIO:

-'Now it is time for Desert Island Discs with Kirsty Young.'

DESERT ISLAND DISCS THEME PLAYS

My theory about why I became an artist

and why I do what I do is play was a guilty pleasure, and so I

think I've chosen a career where play is OK, although it's hard work, too.

Somehow, work and play are very conflated in my work.

-RADIO:

-'It's a wonderful voice and she used to sing wonderful songs.'

# Times have changed

# And we've often rewound the clock

# Since the puritans got a shock...#

I'm doing these drawings for my show which is coming up

and they are grids based on targets for shooting guns.

I had this wire made out of bullets that had been melted down

and drawn into wire.

When they make wire, the process is called drawing,

so it is literally drawing the bullets into a long line.

# In olden days a glimpse of stockings

# Was looked down as something shocking

# Now, heaven knows...

# Anything goes. #

So, this is taken from a target

and what I'm going to do is I'm going to puncture holes in a grid

so I can use that as a template to thread the bullet wire through.

I like the idea of this kind of violent thing being made

into something little bit more formal and considered.

But I think violence has been there for a long time for me

in my work and I kind of think I suppose violence is there

in sculptural practice traditionally.

You know, you get to forge the metal, you get to chip away at the stone,

so there's lots of little violent acts going on all the time,

but by the time you get your traditionally finished piece,

that's all been smoothed over,

you can't see the kind of violence that has gone into making something.

Somehow, the bullet with all its energy and its potential for death

and its potential for all kinds of things, and then having that...

DOOR OPENS

-Hi.

-Hi, Jeff.

-How's it going?

-OK, good.

-You're working away?

Yeah, I'm working on my bullet grids.

-Very good.

-I'm discussing why I'm so violent.

Oh, oh! I just walked in at that moment!

# An answer when you propose

# Anything goes... #

-RADIO:

-'That was Cole Porter's Anything Goes...'

-Would did you get me, then?

-I got coils.

Coils and flatbread, your favourite. A bit mangled.

Yeah, got this great kebab shop opposite our studios,

which is our favourite place anyway, before we even got these studios.

I got a phone call from the washing machine people.

Yeah, I saw that.

-So it's coming at 5:20.

-Perfectly bad timing, but never mind.

The Maybe was a collaboration between Tilda Swinton and myself.

Tilda, at the time, was like an arthouse movie star.

She had a cult following and people were saying,

"Oh, bring me back a stocking or a relic of Tilda,"

because, you know, she had that mystique.

And then I had this idea of the relic,

the idea of things belonging to people who are long dead.

So there was 30-odd objects

that were all in their own individual glass cases.

Some of them together,

like Queen Victoria's stocking next to Wesley's spurs,

or Faraday's spark apparatus next to Babbage's brain.

And then there was Tilda, as herself, in a glass case.

She was sleeping for eight hours a day for seven days.

She just lay asleep in the glass case.

So The Maybe was sort of not necessarily

about Tilda's place in posterity, but about us all, really.

That we're all still alive.

Tilda was still alive and breathing the same way as we were,

but was absent because she was asleep.

I wear these gloves just because they're less poisonous, obviously.

Don't want to be any more brain-damaged than I already am!

I should call this The Long-winded Bullet!

SHE LAUGHS

This definitely reminds me of doing samplers at school,

when I was at primary school.

We would always have to take a little square of linen

and do rows and rows of different stitches.

Sometimes, being an artist or making art is just...

I'd rather you called it something else.

People think you are on some elevated plane, which you're not.

You are just doing, you know,

I suppose, a quite privileged activity.

But you don't want to set yourself apart from society.

You're very much part of society.

I think I was kind of quite an insular child, really.

I'm much more gregarious now.

But as a child, I was very sort of introverted and shy.

I thought art was about being in the studio in an interior world,

and that gradually, as I've become more extrovert over the years,

and gone out into the world, then you end up having

these conversations with people about, "Oh, I am an artist."

And they will say, "Oh, what materials do you use?"

"Are a you sculptor?" You know?

They would say, "Oh, do you use clay or do you carve or do you...?"

They're wanting you to talk about your traditional craft

and how you spent your years perfecting it,

and I try and explain the materials I use and the way I work.

Then they get caught up with,

"Oh, you blew a shed up?" or, "You threw something off a cliff?"

And they get transported by that process,

and then they forget about the art bit, which is quite nice.

I think it's good to forget about the art bit, really.

One of the people who has been the biggest influence on me

and my work has been Duchamp.

He made a piece where he draped a mile of string

over a surrealist exhibition, obscuring everybody else's work.

SHE LAUGHS

And I love this piece. It's a very naughty piece of sabotage,

and I've always wanted to re-enact it.

I did a piece where I borrowed Rodin's The Kiss.

What I did was tie the mile of string around the heads

of the two lovers, binding them together.

Instead of The Kiss, I called it The Distance,

and then, in brackets, "A Kiss With String Attached."

So then the piece became more about relationships, perhaps intimacies,

about the chords that bind you together can also suffocate you.

-Hello?

-Hi! Cornelia!

-Hi.

-Hello.

-How are you?

-Very good.

-How are you doing?

-Good.

'Sometimes, before an exhibition,

'you've got this big rush of creativity,

'and you try to get things out in time to show

'and some of the things just fall away.

'I'm in that stage now. I'm firing on all cylinders,

'but I realise I should be

'just concentrating on a couple of things and doing them well.'

Basically, another of my bullet drawings

but they are like sutures,

so they're more like stitches.

But I quite like the back.

So I wanted to be able to show both the back and the front,

or have the option of a frame where both those possibilities are there.

OK. It's strangely, actually, quite beautiful and elegant, actually.

-Yeah, it's kind of curious.

-Yeah, isn't it?

It is quite a relief when I come here.

I associate this place with happiness,

because I've resolved something enough to bring it to Keith

for him to give it the best possible presentation.

So, yeah, it's a nice feeling.

I have done some bullet drawings before,

which were like wire meshes

that were trapped between two sheets of glass,

which Keith was brilliant at solving that problem.

This is another way.

-This is another way. You can see both sides.

-Sold!

That's good. I like that. I'm going to show this instead, actually.

This is a much better idea.

It's got a ticket saying, "Sold" on it!

For a long time, I made work that was ephemeral and didn't survive.

Basically because I didn't want to be even thinking about commerce

when I was making work.

Gradually, I think, over time realised

that collectors are custodians of your work.

And so I kind of got a little bit more grown-up

about allowing the work to be sold and collected.

This is a photograph taken in Jerusalem,

but just outside, in the courtyard of The Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

and this is on a round metal bathysphere thing,

which is a bomb disposal unit.

It's where they put suspect parcels.

Last year, I had three trips to Jerusalem

and Bethlehem, and the West Bank, and being part of a big exhibition there.

I made some work which a couple of pieces are going to be in the show.

So that's spilt milk in Jerusalem.

-And this is an oil stain in Bethlehem.

-OK.

'I think being an artist is a political act.

'But I like to wear my politics lightly, I think.

'I don't want to box myself into a corner with my work.

'I want to keep my freedoms and I want the work to have duality.'

Oh, great, it looks good.

'If you have too overtly a political point,

'then it closes down the possibility of the work.'

There's going to be a suite of 12 photographs

which I took of Pentonville Prison wall,

which builders were filling the cracks in the walls

of the prison outside, and these looked like fantastic abstract

expressionist paintings to me.

I just visually responded to them, because they reminded me

of things which already existed in the world, which was art.

But these were not meant as art. This was just somebody filling cracks.

Took the prison photographs last year,

and this is a few months on

and I am now hanging outside the women's prison

hoping somebody is going to come over the top.

I've only seen these cracks

when I have been speeding by in the car on the way to the Waitrose.

As you do.

Oh. Yeah, nice.

Yeah, very different from the boys' prison wall.

-BEHIND CAMERA:

-In what way?

Well, it's just got a whole different mood.

It is much more delicate. It's no Prisoner: Cell Block H here.

-A bit more feminine?

-Yeah.

Might be projection on my behalf, though.

Were you aware of a moment

where you had earned the right to be an artist?

Erm...

Well, I think I've always thought of myself as being an artist,

even though, I mean, whether anybody else thinks I'm an artist or not.

But I felt comfortable in the role,

so I feel I must be being an artist...always.

But it doesn't mean that my art's any good!

SHE LAUGHS

Do you not think your art is good?

Yeah, well, I think I've made some good art.

I've made some bad art too, but I try hard to make good art.

I won't know, really, until I've printed one or two of these up

if they are going to work or whether they, you know,

I'm just photographing pretty patterns.

I think it's because the pretty patterns are on a prison wall.

What is it called? Jacob And The Angel.

Oh, I thought we saw one like this when we went to Rome.

-The marble pieces.

-Oh, yeah.

Not quite exciting as this one.

This one is very exciting.

This show is all about the British art collection, what the Tate owns.

'Being a mother certainly changes the attitude to my work.

'I was pretty well-established when Lily was born.

'So it wasn't a major setback to my career.

'And it was fantastic in a way,

'because it allowed me to become a child again.'

Hey, let's go in there! That looks good.

'So revisiting the cracks in the pavement

'and all kinds of things,

'I think it's made quite a lot of difference

'to the way I view the world.'

Oh, look. Oh, don't look, Lil!

No, it's a nice view of an elephant's bottom.

There's not much art that you can say includes an elephant's bottom.

But it would be amazing if there were!

'I expected to live a life of penury

'and make art as some kind of philosophical reason for being

'and not expecting to make a living out of it.'

This is really brilliant.

I love that stuff.

I like that one.

I sometimes have to pinch myself that I have had work on display here.

But familiarity makes it less scary.

So I'm pretty happy that I have got quite a few

works in the collection here.

My dreams have come true, which is quite weird, really.

-It's lovely, that one, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Let's go and see the rest of the show, shall we?

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