I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.
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.
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.
My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.
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.
You only get one life, so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do.
To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.
I do 10 minutes of Pilates every morning if I'm in the mood.
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.
I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn't really done any introduction courses in sculpture... I'd missed all the technical stuff. I didn't really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I'd sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.
I need eight hours of sleep, but I never get it except at weekends.
My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.
Our cultural industries are our biggest export, our biggest manufacturing base. Every pound spent on art education brings disproportionately large returns. It's the biggest bang for our buck. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In fact, the more you put in, the greater the successes for the U.K. economy.
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.
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.
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.
I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.
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.
Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.
I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.
I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.
That's the problem with working and living in the same space - my studio is downstairs, so I often get distracted by domestic things.
Traditional conceptual art is very dry.
I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.
I'm not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.
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.
I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.
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.
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 didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.
The idea of going off to an office every day and 'putting on my art hat' doesn't appeal.
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.
I don't drive for pleasure. It's purely to get from A to B.
I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.
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.
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 was my father's sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.
I'm trying not to go through that midlife dip that artists tend to have.
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.
The best ideas come out of getting lost.
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 both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.
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.
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.
Dust, in the end, settles on everything.
Some people separate their work and home lives, but I love the idea of having my studio and house in the same space.
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.
