Ellen Gallagher Quotations

There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know.

Regardless of your support, you need to make work.

I do think you can change the past and the present somehow. Even if something has already happened, it doesn't mean it's settled.

When a writer makes something, it's theirs forever. That is the magic for me.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive. But that's the swish in the work, I think. It's really important to me that the work isn't just sitting on top of something, that the materials are woven together - that they are recognisable and from the world.

The things that separate the planes are the incisions and the edges of the matter. Each separate layer of cutting or painting is visible and readable as an edge.

I like radically cutting into the painting, inserting these paper birds, and then trying to figure out how to believe in it.

At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth.

The protocols of science fiction and the protocols of science are not separate-they'r e woven together.

This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process-this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries.

Artists know that you can take an advertising sign and make something joyful with it. It's sometimes hard for people who don’t make things to understand labor and joy and attention and whimsy.