Inside the studio of sculptor Cornelia Parker 

‘Working from home changed my work for the better,’ says Cornelia Parker, identifying the moment she moved from abstract to representation. ‘I cast lead models of Sacré-Coeur and the Empire State Building, which I had displayed on my mantelpiece, then I hung them on the ceiling, because that was where the available space was.’

More than 30 years later, the large-scale and often suspended installations, for which she is renowned, are assembled in situ by Cornelia, who still works in a studio at her house in north London. Nowadays, the studio is on the first floor of the south-facing Victorian terrace in Kentish Town that she and her family moved to eight years ago. ‘I chose this room for the light and the warmth – my cat follows the sun around. It is my favourite room in the house and where I spend most time,’ she says.

She has a large Arts and Crafts desk that used to belong to the artist duo Gilbert & George. ‘It has coffee rings on it and little burns along one edge, where they used to put down their cigarettes to come back to later – things that Marcel Duchamp would call inframince.’ The imbuing of a new history by these blemishes relates to Cornelia’s own interest in transformation. For Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-9), she took more than a thousand abandoned, silver-plated domestic objects, steamrollered them and then suspended the crushed pieces – giving them a new beauty and adding biblical connotations through the title. She created Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by blowing up a disused garden shed and then restoring the surviving contents. ‘I resurrect things that have been killed off. My work is all about the potential of materials, even when it looks as if they have lost all their qualities,’ she explains.

This is a significant year for Cornelia, marked by a career-defining retrospective at Tate Britain. The exhibition unites the aforementioned installations with recent work and films, conceived and edited in this room. War Machine (2015) was filmed in the factory that makes poppies for Remembrance Sunday. The vast, tent-like structure of War Room (2015) was built by layering strips of the leftover, punched out, red poppy paper. Also in the show is Cornelia’s new film FLAG (2022), which depicts the unmaking of the Union Jack. ‘You see scissors repairing fabric, rather than cutting it – it’s rather beautiful,’ she says. ‘Although it’s political, it’s not didactic. Art should be like music. When you are listening to a piece of music, you don’t think about what the composer meant – you allow yourself to be transported by it. That’s what I want for my art’.

‘Cornelia Parker’ is at Tate Britain, SW1, until October 16: tate.org.uk