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00:00Coming to my little domain, that is powdered cocaine, which has been burnt and
00:14incinerated by the customer's excise, and they gave me a big bag of it.
00:18This one's, oh, this is snake venom from a diamond-batten rattlesnake, and those are
00:26my poison inks. This is bullet wire. I've had bullets melted down and made into wire.
00:37That is actually meteoric iron. Feathers that have been to the top of Everest. The whole
00:42point for me of being an artist is to not follow rules.
00:46This is your art. Oh, my God, look at me. This is my art. I mean, yes, no, I crush things,
01:03I throw things off cliffs, I blow them up. Three, two, one, firing. My head's my studio,
01:10and the world's my studio. B-flat. And there it goes. Goodbye, horn.
01:23This and Saltpeter will make an explosive mix. The people who have expectations of what artists
01:29do are people not making art. It's always going to be naysayers.
01:34What's an obscenity? I'm not going to conform to that. Fuck em. Bleep. I just have to make
01:45the work that I feel compelled to make. This is what the world is like. We don't live in
01:51a paradise. Art shouldn't just be easy listening. People say, oh, why is your work so violent?
02:00I can't say, oh, it's because my dad was violent. Because it's not that simple at all.
02:07Have you come? Okay. Is she in shot? She is on the wide shot. So people don't know what I'm doing
02:33with my hands. She's so curious. Aren't you, darling? That's your earpiece. Oh, yes. Thank you.
02:45Okay. Okay. So this is the little tithed cottage that we rented. It was the middle of nowhere,
02:56Russia and the countryside. My childhood was one of the other happiest times of my life.
03:03Because I had, yeah, a schizophrenic mother and a very mercurial and bullying father.
03:15Oh, is that me? In that documentary, we went to this little pitiful barn that I remember
03:29as a child. Wow. Oh, God, it's so small. There'll be two stalls here for two cows. And I used to milk the cows by hand in here. So my stool down here. And when the cats were all lined up, I'd go and squirt their faces.
03:54But it's tiny, tiny. You know, I was obviously just a small child. I was getting my affection from the animals, not my family.
04:04They're great if you're miserable, because they can pick up on that, and then they become very gentle. That's why I've always been into cats.
04:11You know, grown up in a quite poor situation, really, financially. Several generations of peasant, smallholding. And my father was in and out of hospital with Crohn's disease, you know.
04:26There wasn't lots of money flowing. And there was so much to do. And he wanted sons to work on the land.
04:33He got three girls. I was a middle child. So he co-opted me into being a boy.
04:39You can see the haircut. Everything about me is more masculine, really. I spent a lot of time milking cows, mocking out pigs, planting vegetables.
04:54So I had to swap my childhood for childhood of work, in a way.
05:01My father made me feel guilty for playing.
05:04And he was quite a violent man. He would turn on a sixpence.
05:08I was a fearful child. Anything would promote my father. It was irrational.
05:19And because I was the surrogate's son, I got the brunt of that.
05:24My two sisters were more protected, because they were indoor girls, you know.
05:28I never knew when it was going to happen. So you've always been very vigilant.
05:31I'm sure my father had been bullied by his father. You know, it just hasn't.
05:38You know, the Philip Larkin poem, they fuck you up, your mum and dad.
05:42They don't mean to, but they do. It's very true, I think.
05:45Although I did think he wanted to, he must be, he didn't mean to fuck us up.
05:49He was completely smitten with my mother, right to the end.
05:53And he never hit her. But he was jealous of any attention she gave to us.
05:58He liked encouraging combat between me and my older sister after dinner or lunch, you know, physical combat.
06:09So we'd have a fight on the floor, you know, and he would encourage that.
06:13Which was, you know, when I think back on it, that was really slightly sinister.
06:18You know, that there's all this pent up anger, you know, that I felt as a child.
06:26And obviously perhaps my older sister too, so we used to vent it on each other.
06:30And he'd watch.
06:32Yeah, he was a very controlling man.
06:35You know, and my mum was in and out of being mentally ill, so she was sometimes not available to look after us in the way that she might.
06:48She was from southern Germany.
06:52She was in the war as a nurse in the Luftwaffe.
06:56You know, she was a prisoner of war.
06:58You know, I think unspeakable things happened to her.
07:01And then I think she married somebody who she thought was one person but ended up being another.
07:09She was Catholic, which meant we three girls were going regularly to high mass.
07:16I had this idea of my soul being this white sheet that had been described to me by the priest.
07:21And that if you descend, there would be a dark mark on your soul.
07:26And my sheet was always covered in dark marks.
07:31You know, that certainly fires up your mind as a child.
07:36I mean, also, I was being read Strummelpeter, Strawpeter, by my mother.
07:42For all cautionary tales for children.
07:51This was my landscape as a child.
07:56You know, it's...
07:58So you've got damnation happening in cautionary tales for children, German ones,
08:03and then, you know, the Roman lot doing... filling in the gaps.
08:10Living in the countryside and quite remote,
08:13I didn't really have friends because I was a, you know, slightly awkward child.
08:18Living in my own interior world.
08:21When I was 15, I went to the table. It was my school.
08:22And I remember walking through the hallowed portals,
08:37and I'm pretty sure the kiss was there,
08:40as it always was in the rotunda by Rodin.
08:44Seeing the things in reality was just extraordinary.
08:49And it just sort of blew me away, really.
08:52And that's when everything changed.
08:54I understood what art could be, and what it could do, and how it could change your view of the world.
09:10I just thought, wow, this could be for me.
09:15I've got a solo show coming up.
09:27At Fifth Street Gallery.
09:28All completely new work.
09:31I've been making paintings for the first time.
09:37I'd like to think I could swim in that sea, as it were.
09:42I'm looking at materials I've used over the last 30 years, really.
09:54Just me testing out the pigment.
09:58Just part of my process.
10:00This is how things evolve, I suppose.
10:01Everything's up for grabs, really.
10:04Two art teachers at school thought I had potential,
10:28as we could see how keen I was on art.
10:30And I should do A-level.
10:33And so they championed me to my parents.
10:37My father, you know, wanted me to leave school at 16,
10:41get a job at a factory.
10:43He had no ambition for me.
10:45And that last two years, my parents were quite rocky.
10:47I remember once my father slamming the front door, which was, you know, heavy glass, etched glass, in my face, and it broke.
10:58And I got scars all over my arms.
11:01And he made me pay for the door.
11:03And so when I left home, you know, at 18, it was so liberating.
11:07It was great.
11:08Going to art school.
11:09Woo!
11:10I'm out of the gate.
11:14And that was, you know, why art became a very important thing in my life.
11:19Luckily, I got a free education.
11:27You know, I had six years at art school, three different places, which were all free.
11:33And it transformed me.
11:36I thought I was going to study painting, and then I realised I really liked the real light coming in through the real window.
11:47So I just kind of shifted halfway from my degree to do sculpture.
11:53And it was only at the end of my degree I really got to understand about contemporary art,
11:57or what had happened in the 60s and 70s, and Art of Povera, which is telling the movement, poor art, using any old material.
12:05Even poo could be art.
12:07Manzoni canned his own shit.
12:13But most of all, Marcel Duchamp became a very central to a lot of my thinking.
12:19He's probably best known for his urinal, but he's so much more than that.
12:23He was more or less the founder of the conceptual art movement.
12:27You think of all the art that went before him.
12:30It was very retinal.
12:32It was to do with what it looked like, rather than the ideas behind it.
12:36It really threw the whole thing into a different perspective for me.
12:42And then I moved to London.
12:45Lengstone was like this hotbed of creativity.
12:53Because there was Artists Housing Association.
12:56There was a huge number of artists living there.
13:02It was so exciting.
13:04You could feel the energy in the air.
13:09It was just like electric shock.
13:11So vivid and so exciting.
13:13Hedonistic days.
13:15We had a lot of parties.
13:17This was a disaster party.
13:18The sinking of the Titanic.
13:22This wonderful cape, which was icebergs from Joey.
13:28This is so funny.
13:30Teddy lying face down in a puddle of plastic sick.
13:34As you go.
13:38Too much.
13:40And those people who are my friends, some of them have been friends for 40 years.
13:45It really felt like I'd come home.
13:47You know, this big cuckoo that jumped into this nest full of...
13:50..of fabulous people.
13:53It was just like a big explosion of creativity at that time.
13:58I just listened to my own voice.
14:02I flourished.
14:04I made my sculptures in the house.
14:06It kind of felt like I didn't want to adhere to the so-called rules of making art.
14:12From parents telling me that you can't make art.
14:16You can't play.
14:18You know, that carried on into my adult life.
14:21I would just not listen to naysayers, basically.
14:24I had a really major breakthrough at this point.
14:30I remember sending some slides to Ivana Blaswick.
14:34The great curator.
14:36Who had been at the ICA and she was then at the Air Gallery.
14:41And she did this new British sculpture show.
14:45And she put me in it.
14:47All these pieces I had in the house went into this show.
14:50My career then started to have some kind of momentum.
14:54Actress Tilda Swinton is sleeping for a living in a new exhibition of performance art,
14:59which has just opened in London.
15:01She's spending eight hours a day in a glass box.
15:04The work was called The Maybe.
15:09My God.
15:11Me looking much younger.
15:13Artist Cornelia Parker surveying her exhibit.
15:15The work, called The Maybe, was dreamt up apparently as a demonstration of life and death.
15:24It was a collaboration between Tilda and I.
15:27I'm very glad that I got involved in it.
15:29I'd been making installations and sculpture for 20 years at this point.
15:33But it was the first time I'd been thrown into the public eye outside the art world.
15:37The piece was really popular. People still talk about it.
15:42Is it art or all pretentious nonsense?
15:46This sleeping beauty in street clothes caused quite a stir.
15:50Tilda Swinton, star of Art House Films, has turned herself into a work of art.
15:55Tilda Swinton was thinking of sleeping at Snow White and I said to her,
15:58Look, I think the Snow White's naff.
16:01You're much more interested in sleeping yourself because more people can project onto you what they want you to be.
16:08You know, what makes it art is the space available for the viewer to enter the piece.
16:13It was very, very normal in the sense that she's completely at peace with herself, which I think a lot of people would envy.
16:27I think it was quite extraordinary.
16:30But some critics are not at all impressed.
16:33If you're going to ask me if it's art, the answer is quite clearly no, it's a performance.
16:37I think if you're going to exhibit yourself, you ought to be in sort of fairy princess costume, waiting for the frog to come along or the fairy prince or whatever to do his business.
16:52Very disappointing.
16:54How funny.
16:56Very flat.
16:57It seems so dated, so curious that people's opinion about art then seemed to be so much more remedial than they are now.
17:07But I was up for the fray.
17:09Do you think people think that it's art?
17:12Well, I don't think it really matters if they think it's art or not.
17:14I think people should come along and, like, listen to a piece of music, you know, just experience it.
17:19And not think it has to have a fixed meaning. It's for people to come and endure and experience, really.
17:24I don't really care if my work's art, to be quite honest.
17:28You know, it's up to the viewer whether they think it's art or not.
17:32I was fearless, really.
17:35Used to combat.
17:36I quite like to get some colour into what I'm doing.
17:50I'm going to make pigments out of dinosaur bones.
17:56There's so much culture, cultural references to dinosaurs.
17:59Dinosaurs, dinosaurs are a thing in our lives, even though we've never seen one.
18:04And the idea of them being extinct and something catastrophic happened to get rid of the dinosaurs.
18:10And we might be at that point in history where perhaps mankind would, you know, disappear too.
18:16So the dinosaurs are me looking back with awe on something that's larger than life.
18:22So I'm trying to get more colourful pigment, you know, because I've got a nice range of pale pinks and greys and beiges.
18:32And this caught my eye.
18:35A fossilised dinosaur poo, 70 million years old.
18:40And I thought, oh, that looks like it could be a nice yellow ochre.
18:44And it fits very nicely in the hand, I thought.
18:47So, this is it.
18:49I managed to buy it.
18:50And now I'm going to break it into pieces.
18:52I'm just collecting the fragments.
19:07Oh, there you go.
19:27Now I mix it with gum arabic, which is a kind of a medium that might make it, you know, adhere together.
19:35And this will be a nice yellow ochre for the new show.
19:46Oh, yes, St. Paul's Cathedral.
19:48It's such a nice project. I really enjoyed doing that.
20:06So I was making the work for Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to climb Everest.
20:11It felt especially sort of stupid having a phobia about heights.
20:24This is a tough bit for me.
20:27Vertigo, it feels very physical.
20:30I mean, it's not rational at all.
20:33And I think it's partly because I feel drawn to the edge of things.
20:37I feel like I'm going to throw myself off something.
20:39So I, you know, I'm frightened of the zone, you know, that I don't want to be out of control.
20:46So I'm sort of backing away from that.
20:48Then in the same moment, discovering there was this blanket of fluff all the way around the whispering gallery in between the railings because it's an area you wouldn't normally, nobody's going to be on my hands and knees in the whispering gallery except for me, of course.
21:05All the cumulative visitors have been to this whispering gallery.
21:10So this is almost like, I don't know, some kind of acoustic build-up.
21:14In those moments, that's when, you know, inspiration strikes.
21:19I knew at least it was very interesting material to gather.
21:22So the idea of making the earplugs out of the fluff came out of a very heightened state.
21:34You're completely mad, Cornelia.
21:37Terror and wonder at the same time.
21:40I'm sure you've been called that in the past.
21:42That's why working not in a studio is for me the best solution because I put myself in those situations.
21:53You know, I've made works where I've sort of on top of the white cliffs of Dover and thrown things over the cliff and I'm really, you know, terrified.
22:01There's all kinds of situations where there might be a similar feeling to vertigo, which is to do with fear.
22:12Things like steamrolling things or placing coins on a railway track.
22:16You know, all those things are really quite challenging.
22:20And so I don't find it a very comfortable space to be in, but I'm in it a lot, I realise.
22:25I'm drawn to it.
22:26And I think it's where real creativity lies, really.
22:29You know, that's where the rub is.
22:34I love Charlie Chaplin and it's a very Chaplin-esque thing to have something squashed.
22:40You know, where he squashes his boss's fob watch by mistake in a factory in modern times.
22:50It's got a comedic moment.
22:53But it's also a death.
22:55With my work, there's, there's death and resurrection.
23:00You know, once I've dealt it the blow, it gets suspended above the ground.
23:05It's been formalised in a way.
23:07There's 30 pieces of silver, I squashed these objects, but then I gave them back their volume by suspending them.
23:20So it's a kind of reinstating them.
23:22There's a lot of repair going on in my work.
23:27I'm trying to redeem.
23:33There's violence, but there's also redemption.
23:36Making work is almost like a digesting process, you know, although I very often have bad tummies.
23:42So I'm not sure if it's the right metaphor, but, um, some things, things to chew on, things that are undigestible, things hard to swallow, all those metaphors.
23:50Does that help psychologically in some way?
23:54I think it must do, you know.
23:59I've lived with a spectre of depression all my life, you know, and I've been trying to avert it.
24:05I think it's there in the work.
24:09It has light in it and fun.
24:15There's a darkness underneath it all.
24:18And when people say, oh, why do you have such destructive tendencies?
24:22Why do you have that in your work?
24:25Well, the world's got that in the work.
24:27You know, this is what the world is like.
24:30You can work things out metaphorically, almost, through the work.
24:35When I'm making my work, I'm not thinking about my own personal state.
24:40I'm, I'm, that's in the background.
24:42And I presume it's there.
24:43And it's there for every artist, I think.
24:46But when I'm making work, I'm looking at external things, usually, and making work in response to them.
24:53But I presume that the internal and external will be combined in the work.
24:57And that's like the exploded shed.
24:59Four, three, two, one, firing.
25:09This piece was a kind of struggle to sort of quantify some, perhaps even an emotional state.
25:19It was referring to a kind of inner explosion.
25:21The garden shed was quite nice.
25:24It was like an attic.
25:25It was like a depository for all the things you don't want to throw away.
25:29Sheds were part of my upbringing because, you know, we had lots of sheds being a smallholding.
25:35You know, people say, well, you were blowing up your dad.
25:40Dad's domain.
25:42Because garden sheds tend to be the domain of men.
25:45And I was blowing it up.
25:48I didn't exhibit it on the floor as fragments.
25:52It was in the air.
25:54So it was resurrected.
25:56There's a repair going on.
25:57Geoff seemed totally different from my father.
26:10He was very calm and very mature.
26:13Not like me.
26:15But he had this nice, still center, which I really liked.
26:19Very tall.
26:20Massive hands.
26:22I don't know why I brought that up.
26:23But he just seemed like a very steady rock-like person, which is a rare thing.
26:32So I found him very calming to be around.
26:35I met Geoff at a very exciting time in my life.
26:38He was an artist living in San Antonio.
26:41Amazing place.
26:43I was looking for something that had been struck by lightning in Texas.
26:47And that was going to be the place I'd find the thing.
26:49They have really big weather there.
26:50And within 13 days of me being there, this church got struck by lightning.
26:55And burnt to the ground.
26:58And people were coming and taking things from the burnt church.
27:01You know, wiring.
27:03Anything that was worth any money, you know, people came in and took away.
27:06And I asked if I could have the charcoal, because it seemed to be the thing nobody else wanted.
27:10We really bonded over this six-hour journey.
27:16I hardly knew her when I got in the car, to be honest with you.
27:19And we just had this amazing conversation about art and life and music.
27:23And by the end of the journey, I was, you know, I was a bit smitten already, you know, because she was just a fascinating person to know.
27:31So he helped me gather up the charcoal and he helped me suspend it.
27:36You know, we were building a church together.
27:39At the time, I wasn't thinking, this is going to be my future husband.
27:45We just clicked.
27:47And by the end of the project, we'd become, you know, a couple.
27:50We could have some really deep, great conversations about art, life and everything.
27:57So kindred spirits.
27:59Lots of things changed in my life.
28:00It was a turning point.
28:02Four women have been shortlisted for contemporary art's most important and controversial award,
28:08the £20,000 Turner Prize.
28:10The prize is awarded to an artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or work over the past 12 months.
28:16I was 40, you know, it didn't feel like, you know, I felt it's about time.
28:25I was nominated for the series of work called Avoided Object, made of things that nobody wanted.
28:31A range of these small works in vitrines.
28:37And then there was my big church struck by lightning piece called Mass.
28:42Yeah, brilliant time. It was a brilliant thing for me. It was a catalyst for my career.
28:52Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 1997 Turner Prize.
28:58The winner is Gillian Ware.
29:02Not winning the Turner Prize was fine. My life was great anyway.
29:07The work going well, love life going well.
29:11Got married on Brocklin Bridge at sunset.
29:16Both really enjoyed being married, you know.
29:21We'd call each other husband and wife.
29:23Do you have to say wife?
29:26And I say husband.
29:27We'd talked about having children.
29:31I said, look, if you want children, we shouldn't hang around, you know, because I'm 40 and blah, blah, blah.
29:37He said, no, I'm not particularly interested in having children.
29:40So we just kind of ignored it and took precautions, except for one night.
29:44I discovered I was pregnant, and I'd be giving birth at 45, which seemed to be slightly alarming.
29:55Several months pregnant, I was making an exhibition at a museum in Turin, and I was very obsessed with the Turin Shroud.
30:03And so I was looking for fabric, materials, I was looking online, I was looking at auctions.
30:11One of the things that put up for sale was this nightgown that Mia Farrow wore in the film, Rosemary's Baby.
30:18She discovers her child's the devil when she's wearing that nightgown.
30:21And I thought, oh, this is great. This is a diptych to the Turin Shroud.
30:34You know, the Turin Shroud is about the possibly fictional death of Christ, of Jesus.
30:40And this is about definitely a fictional birth of the devil.
30:46I was up till two or three in the morning bidding online for this nightgown.
30:49You know, why, you know, am I mad?
30:55I was very fearful of being a mother because of, you know, my poor old mum was schizophrenic,
31:02and she, her mother died when she was four, so she hadn't been mothered either.
31:07So mothering wasn't a skill I had.
31:15Lydia arrived.
31:16Oh, great.
31:21When they brought her over to me, and Jeff, and I was very pleased she got red hair,
31:29because, you know, Jeff's redhead, and I was hoping that would be the case.
31:33And then, er, but then she just really looked at both of us very intently,
31:39and then she sort of more or less lunged for me.
31:43You know, she would, she would drain every scrap of milk I had,
31:48and, er, you know, and then would smack her lips and go to sleep.
31:50It was quite a joy.
31:56Oh, yeah, she's a cutie.
32:01She was a real character.
32:04A bit of an extrovert.
32:06Jeff was a great dad, and he was pretty great during her childhood.
32:22He was even thinking we should have another one.
32:24And I wasn't so sure.
32:29Being a mother was really healing, in a way.
32:32That's the thing I didn't expect, that I was going to have a childhood again, too.
32:37And so Lily and I were partners in crime in that.
32:39Hello, welcome to a special series of University Challenge for Christmas.
32:44Now, before I introduce tonight's teams, I want to say one...
32:48Right, ten points for this.
32:50What term denotes a generator that converts mechanical power to energy
32:54in the form of DC electrical currents through the use of a commutator?
33:00Alternator.
33:02No, anyone to buzz from Redding?
33:04Redding Parker.
33:06Sausages.
33:07Sausages.
33:10Dynamo, ten points for this.
33:14Lily and I played a game.
33:15If you can't answer a question, you just say sausages.
33:18So, I said, if I was on this programme and people couldn't answer a question,
33:23I was going to say sausages for her.
33:25So, to watch out for the sausages.
33:27And sure enough, I managed to squeeze it in.
33:31I'm in the last few weeks before my exhibition.
33:39It's a bit nerve-wracking.
33:42The show's coming up fast now.
33:45There's a lot of expectation.
33:46I'm in the painting mode at the moment.
33:52There's a load of oil paintings made in this room.
33:58Very formal painting with a very informal palette.
34:03And this is called 90 million years and counting.
34:07It's me making daubs, dinosaur daubs on glass.
34:11These yellow ochers are fossilised dinosaur poop.
34:15And this is teeth.
34:17There's a bit of T-Rex in there, given to me by Manchester Museum.
34:20The colour is charged. The pigment has got its own history.
34:26I'm not doing a painting of a dinosaur. I'm painting with dinosaurs.
34:31When I told people I was having a painting show, they said,
34:35but you're not a painter.
34:37And I just thought, why can't I be, you know?
34:40It doesn't really matter in the end about the medium.
34:42It's more the message for me.
34:43You have to ignore the noise, I think.
34:54That's the only way anything I've ever done has been made.
34:58Shutting out the noise and doing it anyway.
35:13I was offered to make something for this great spot on the roof.
35:25I was very daunted because the skyline is so amazing.
35:28So I thought I wanted to put something architectural on the roof.
35:31A kind of incongruous, you know, domestic house.
35:35That was definitely the best space I've ever been asked to make a work for.
35:40The roof of the Metropolitan Museum.
35:41You know, it's just a blank roof with the most amazing skyline and Central Park.
35:49And it being on the top of one of the most amazing museums in the world.
36:05The red barn's a humble thing.
36:07Typified the American dream in a way.
36:09Originally it was going to be a red barn, but then I realised quite quickly that red barns are far too big to go on the roof.
36:17And then I was looking at Hopper, Edward Hopper paintings, and he painted a house called the House by the Railroad.
36:22I realised that Hitchcock had based his Psycho House on this painting, and I really loved that.
36:32There's a tragicomic element to this, I think. You know, that it's got that familiarity with the red barn, which makes you feel happy.
36:37And then there's this dark undertow of what it is. It's not really a building, it's a facade, and it looks a bit melancholy, and you don't know what's going on inside it.
36:47And then when you walk around the back, you realise there's nothing inside it, it's just a facade.
36:51A transitional object is a psychological term. It's about the object that weans you off your parents, you know, the teddy bear or the blanket.
37:05This stuff is more personal than I think it is, you know.
37:11The Psycho Bomb was really about, well, probably my childhood.
37:14You know, this thing was about the, um, a scary psychological space, you know.
37:22And my mother had, I think she had her first nervous breakdown when I was three.
37:27I went into hospital then. She had these episodes.
37:31You know, she had attempted suicide when she was younger with all her various mental illnesses.
37:37She became more and more paranoid, and she, to the point that she thought people were trying to kill her.
37:43Um, she would keep all the blinds, you know, the curtains closed in the house,
37:47because she thought there was cameras pointing inwards.
37:50Couldn't watch the TV, because there was cameras on the TV.
37:53She, we all had to wear dark clothes.
37:56Um, you know, everything, every hand movement, every gesture was a signal to a hidden camera.
38:02So it was exhausting.
38:04And, um, she ended up in hospital several times over the years,
38:08um, having electric shock treatment and, um, you know, which seemed to work for a while,
38:13and then it gradually came back.
38:15And then she thought we were plotting, you know.
38:19And so it became a bit more dark and adversarial.
38:31My parents died in 2007.
38:34There was only a ten-week interval between their deaths.
38:38It was quite an emotive thing, because there was a lot of unsaid stuff,
38:44a lot of anger, a lot of distress.
38:49I'd kind of become closer to my parents before they died, you know.
38:54I was trying to help.
38:56That's the time to be kind, I think, to parents, is in the last years of their life,
39:00because, you know, they've, you know, whatever the circumstances are being brought up by them,
39:05you know, that they, that they're, you know, in the twilight of their years,
39:10and usually in some pain.
39:12So, you know, I don't bear them any ill will.
39:15I felt quite a lot of empathy for my mum.
39:26I had my own tussles, mental illness.
39:29I've had a very deep depression.
39:34In 2018, I had an episode that stopped me in my tracks.
39:41It was suicidally deep, and almost like taking over my whole body
39:48and me not being able to control it at all.
39:51I became catatonic. It was that bad. I couldn't even swallow.
39:57The antidepressant I had been on for ten years stopped working.
40:01You know, I don't know, my body was rejecting it.
40:05I just feel like, you know, it most probably could have happened earlier,
40:10but I was so busy with projects that I never really had time
40:13to sort of have a breakdown, basically.
40:17It felt like the end of the world, really.
40:20All I felt, thought about day in, day out was suicide.
40:25I couldn't do it because of Lily and Jeff,
40:27and, you know, I knew rationally that it was an awful thing to do,
40:30and I'd had various friends commit suicide,
40:32so I know what the fallout of that is.
40:35I think that's what broke my marriage with Jeff, really.
40:45It's really hard to be with somebody when they're in such a state.
40:50You know, Jeff just blurted it out, you know,
40:55I don't think he, you know, I think he just couldn't leave it any longer,
40:59that he wanted out of the relationship.
41:02It had been awful for him for the previous couple of years
41:05of my mental state, so I just think he, you know,
41:09tried to keep the marriage together, but it didn't work.
41:13And so that was devastating, of course,
41:16that our 20-odd-year-old marriage was no longer.
41:22You know, we're still good friends, we see each other.
41:24We have Lily, her daughter, you know, so...
41:27It was scary, you know, so scary to think that you're just made up of chemicals.
41:42And if you're not getting the right chemicals,
41:44you can't have creative thought.
41:46You know, that was really scary.
41:48Gradually, you know, the fog lifted.
41:52My family were great, and so were my friends.
41:55In the end, the thing that lifted me out of my depression was medication.
42:00Oh, nice.
42:02I had a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2022.
42:07There's over 100 works in the show.
42:12And I managed to make new work.
42:14That was very important to me.
42:17I needed to know that I could just go back to where I was before.
42:21I've done a lot of looking back on life, and I feel like I just want to park it, really.
42:28And perhaps a lot of the things I do now might be informed by it.
42:31But I can't fill my head with that, because I need to fill it with something else.
42:36I need to fill it with what's happening now.
42:39There's a lot of things happening now.
42:44There's movement.
42:46There's momentum.
42:49I'm really glad to be back in the flow.
42:52I almost feel like it could do with one little one there.
42:56For me, art's about being free, and it's about having a life that you want to live.
43:02I have a life that I want to live.
43:14I'm a single woman again.
43:16You know, I've had a pretty tough few years, but I'm back.
43:21I'm back.
43:22What's this space?
43:26What's this space?
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