Things seem to be going backwards we're soaking ourselves in nostalgia
It's almost like it's an innocence you know that's been lost
Hi Cornelia, what advice would you give to your younger self as a contemporary artist?
You don't need a studio, you don't need lots of money, you just need your imagination to be
an artist, that's why it's really important to build up your battery as it were of things that stimulate you
There's a lot of humour that pervades your work, what do you find funny?
Yes I've been inspired by Tom and Jerry and Roadrunner and them being squashed or falling off cliffs or being blown up
Thirty Pieces of Silver was run over by a steamroller and there's a film by Charlie Chaplin
called Modern Times when he's working in a factory he puts his boss's jacket on this hydraulic press
and the press comes down and squashes the jacket there's this giant fob watch it's like four times
as big as it should be and that was when I thought I want to crush things
Hi Connie, I wondered how you persuaded the army, the police, Customs and Excise, the Houses of Parliament as well
as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to collaborate with you
I enjoy collaborations because you're not
in the studio you're out in the world reacting to people quite a lot of the people I've worked with
are authority figures like the army, the police and they're the people who really sort of scare me a bit
Another collaboration was with the Customs and Excise and they would tell you how creative
it is that people try and smuggle drugs through so they've got people wearing wigs with cocaine
on their heads there was a piece i did called Exhaled Cocaine it's just a pile of burnt cocaine
that's what it is you know I've got a big bag of the stuff and it's curiously still quite potent
even though it's been burnt
My question is how do you ensure that a very complicated installation piece
like the exploding shed has an ongoing integrity? How do you make sure that it is the same piece?
I think the wonderful thing about having the Tate own a piece like Cold Dark Matter
is that it is their job to preserve the piece's integrity, I don't want to spend the
rest of my life putting up old pieces when I'm trying to make new ones
The exploded shed's not
exactly the same every single time it's slightly different I like the pieces to be
reflective of life itself it's the opposite of sculpture say by Henry Moore which are solid lumps
never change I mean the explosion is aged 31 years old now I mean it's very old and what
I like about it it's now a time capsule, friends gave me stuff from their sheds, I went to car boot sales
there's a Coke can drunk by one of the soldiers on the day it was exploded and also there's a piece
of missile from the army demolition grounds yeah there was a few little maverick things in there
I remember my next-door neighbour they had a pram i blew up the pram and then
they wanted their pram back
Hi Cornelia is there another building that you would like to blow up?
I was hoping to blow up something bigger you know like a house but it just wasn't possible at the
time perhaps i should do something really big if i'm gonna blow something up like I don't know
the Palace of Westminster perhaps? Perhaps i shouldn't say that
Hi Cornelia I'm really intrigued by the
way you've lit War Room, could you tell us a bit more about the decisions around making it kind
of create that undulating effect?
There's three light bulbs hanging down it's a motif you know
that I've used in other works like the Perpetual Canon or Island or Cold Dark Matter
War Room has a companion piece War Machine which is a film the material for it came from a poppy factory in
Richmond what I was struck by when I visited the factory was this the old machine that chopped the poppies
out of this sheet of paper I quite liked the idea of making a giant tent out of it with a double
moiré so it's two layers of the material it's disorientating I mean some of the installers
start to feel a bit motion sickness by the end of it, I think there's three hundred thousand
holes in the room and it reminds me of the war dead you know the war graves these regimented rows
and you know war is a messy thing it's not a neat thing
You use chalk in so many of your works made
over the last 30 years why is it such an important material for you?
Chalk has been a fascinating
material to work with over the years and I love it because it is literally the edge of England in a
way it's nature and culture and territory and all kinds of things embedded in this one material
The most recent work which I just made for the Tate which is called Island it's a greenhouse that's been
painted on the inside with chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover the strokes of chalk on the window
panes are almost like marking time so there's this idea of the greenhouse being the island and it's floating
on a raft made of tiles from the Houses of Parliament, I don't think the White Cliffs of Dover
are going to protect us from climate change which is one of the things I'm thinking a lot about
and I quite like the fact when the light inside the greenhouse shines it pulsates like a breath
the white marks become black marks and we've got lots of black marks at the moment as an island