CORNELIA PARKER

The best ideas come out of getting lost.

I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.

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

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.

I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.

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.

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

Living in a warehouse is great - but after a while, you just want a garden.

I don't want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.

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?