Bob and Roberta Smith & Cornelia Parker: ‘She was an extremely handsome woman who always picked Adonis guys’

Bob and Roberta Smith, 52

Bob and Roberta Smith is the pseudonym of the artist Patrick Brill. He trained as a sign painter in New York and uses text as an art form, creating slogans on banners and placards to challenge elitism and advocate the importance of creativity. His best-known works include 'Make Art Not War' and 'Letter to Michael Gove', the latter reprimanding the Education Secretary for his arts cuts. He lives in London

It's been a funny journey seeing Connie from the age of 21 through to middle age. We were both at Reading University; she was a postgrad while I was an undergraduate. She was a powerful presence: a tall, extremely handsome woman who always picked lantern-jawed, Adonis guys. If I have a single image of Connie from that time, it's of her dancing through the night at Christmas parties with her boyfriend. We had a lot of conversations about green politics and we still have a similar perspective: that there's too many people, and that we're ruining the planet.

Her work interested me even back then as there was an ephemeral feel to it: incredibly delicate installations made of black-and-white paper hanging from delicately suspended threads. One of her first shows I saw was a beautiful sculpture made from thousands of [scale-model] Empire State buildings, arranged in an enormous spiral. For me, she represents a presence in the art world from before the YBA period, that's full of integrity.

While I left Reading and went to Italy for a few years, Connie's art career was developing. Once I was back, in the early 1990s, I started going to these amazing parties she held at a ramshackle Victorian house she lived in, with a wonderful garden that ran down to the railway line in Leytonstone [in east London]. Her haircut and style have not changed since then: elegant black outfits, little shirts and blouses which give her a noble countenance – like she's of the Bloomsbury set.

We are both quite serious people, but it's more on display in her work than in mine. I'm happy to make something joyful and colourful and playful and leave it at that: my poetry comes out of a shambolic, bashed-together, glossy-painted sense of things. I like things to look like they might have fallen off the back of a lorry, but Connie's work is more meaningful and delicately, painstakingly constructed.

She is like a lighthouse: a beacon to me of someone in the art world who's not trying to find new ways to tweak the market, but just making art as she feels it needs to be made.

We're both worried about cuts to the arts and people not understanding what art is all about. I arranged an event up in Scarborough called The Art Party, and she told an amazing story about how she discovered art as a teen, up until when she hadn't even realised people could play with materials. I, on the other hand, was immersed in art from childhood, as my dad ran a school of art; I had it on a plate. It's why I admire her experience: she's discovered the transformative effect of art all for herself.

Cornelia Parker, 59

A Turner-nominated sculptor and installation artist, Parker is best known for works in which she violently destroys objects and suspends the resulting debris, such as 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View', the restored three-dimensional volume of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at her request. She lives in London

Bob was quite shy when we first met, but he's become quite a character since: I like his raffish second-hand car-dealer persona and eccentric dress sense. Those bright clothes and interesting sideburns make him memorable.

Bob went to Rome for a while after university, but when he came back to London we lived for a long time as part of the same small tribe of social sculptors: he, me, Grayson Perry. Bob and I often ended up doing things at the Tate, or at [contemporary-art gallery] Chisenhale. I did my exploded shed in 1991, and he did videos of his mum making concrete vegetable sculptures there, along with little sculptures made out of plaster. I paid Bob £10 for one of those. I keep one of his painted slogans in my studio, and it cheers me up. It says, "All schools should be art schools" Now we tend to be asked to do similar things, such as be on the Board of Trustees of the Tate and members of the Royal Academy.

He giggles a lot, and it makes you want to be cheeky back. I'm not as blunt as he is – he is quite direct and sometimes overly emphatic.

We have a lot in common: I did a scholarship in Rome for three months he did one for three years. And we both like America and had to go there to find our spouse – he married someone from New York, I married someone from Texas.

There's a handful of vocal artists, especially about political matters. I'm one of them, as is Bob, though I don't remember him being as political as he is now. Recently he was campaigning for more women in the Royal Academy, through quotas, and last year he arranged the Art Party conference – a sort of anti-Michael Gove rally. There'd been a 40 per cent drop in children taking GCSE art since 2010, since Gove demoted it from being a core subject. Yet the creative industries are our biggest export! I was one of the speakers. Afterwards there was a lot of drinking and dancing to this grungy Nirvana-like band; he displayed a lot of flailing limbs.

What I like about Bob's work is that it rants on your behalf: it's very agitprop. Last year I curated a room for the Royal Academy summer show, so I asked him if I could put in his letter to Michael Gove. George Osborne was seen reading the sign at the show, and two weeks later Gove was gone [demoted to chief whip in a reshuffle]. Patrick and I like to feel we moved on the debate with a show not known for its political thrust.

Bob and Roberta Smith's new show, 'Art is your Human Right', is at the William Morris Gallery, London E17 (wmgallery.org.uk), to 31 January