Richard Hunt

Everything that exists, natural or man made, contains some sculptural quality or property.

When I enlarge pieces, however, I consider myself to be re-creating the piece in full scale rather than simply copying a small piece. This process of re-creating the piece in the larger scale gives the full-scale work a spontaneity and it keeps the process more open and alive for me as a sculptor through the opportunity to re-experience the ideas that gave rise to the initial subject. . . .

My own use of winged forms in the early '50s is based on mythological themes, like Icarus and Winged Victory. It's about, on the one hand, trying to achieve victory or freedom internally. It's also about investigating ideas of personal and collective freedom. My use of these forms has roots and resonances in the African-American experience and is also a universal symbol. People have always seen birds flying and wished they could fly.

I came to see the strength of my own roots and past. The success of the early phase of the civil rights movement, which resulted in voting rights legislation and the breaking down of obvious barriers like segregated drinking fountains and public accommodations, gave one a sense of being able to prevail. What happened after that was chastening, tempering. Another thing, too, is to discover the obvious—that the foundations of American society were built upon the backs of our forefathers.

One of the central themes in my work is the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial. I see my work as forming a kind of bridge between what we experience in nature and what we experience from the urban, industrial, technology-driven society we live in. I like to think that within the work that I approach most successfully there is a resolution of the tension between the sense of freedom one has in contemplating nature and the sometimes restrictive, closed feeling engendered by the rigors of the city, the rigors of the industrial environment.

Does becoming a critical thinker make you ever critical? You must stand somewhere on the stone steps of the drama.

I like working with my hands, making things and holding things. As a sculptor, I talk about using your head, your heart, and your hands— you think about things, you feel things, and then you use your hands to try to represent what that is, in some material.

To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually.

My sculpture begins and ends with what can be done with metal. Between the beginning and end are other considerations. The drama of the process of each weld involves a change of state from solid to liquid and back to solid. Repetitions of this process bring about construction, a new constellation of the real and the imagined, ruminations in metal. The material basis of my sculpture is metallic opportunities. Bringing pressure to the right points, I draw the aesthetic out of the industrial process. To me, metal is alive. The forms tell their own story—how they resisted the torch and hammer. From the mill through the studio to the gallery, park, or plaza, the sculptor's challenge is to bend the metal to his wishes, hammer it into his vision.

I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination. On the artistic level, freedom was a significant principle in the earlier art movements, such as Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. More recently, public art focuses on the issue of universal freedom.

I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of my and my family's having lived upon this Earth, this planet. In the great scheme of things, it is less than a drop in the bucket, but it pleases me to be able to leave this evidence here for a time.

Sometimes it is not about making art. Sometimes it is about making statements about culture and history or history and culture with or through art.

Trees have long been my metaphor, symbolic of my inner and outer growth—the taproot delving deep into my conscious and subconscious, the origins of my art, life, and family; peripheral roots branching out into other communities, cultures, a cosmos of interweaving inter- actions; a trunk and branches reaching up and out beyond their tips, leaves, fruit, falling here and there.

Public sculpture responds to the dynamics of a community, or of those in it, who have a use for sculpture. It is this aspect of use, of utility, that gives public sculpture its vital and lively place in the public mind.

The challenges utility brings to the sculptor's mind and art, are as varied as the people and the sites encountered with each commission. As sculptors in our time respond creatively to the challenges that the opportunities for the greater utilization of sculpture impose, we establish links with the greatest traditions in sculpture, and with the largest and most diverse audience sculpture has ever had.