The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark. Art can do it all: a life of doing thing… - Richard Hunt

I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures.

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 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.