Martin Puryear Quotes

The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology.

The fire was followed by a period of grieving and then by an incredible lightness, freedom, and mobility.

I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects.

When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

I realized it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting.

There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.

There remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity that can speak, whether it's through beauty, or through ugliness, or whatever quality you put into the work. The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you to say things about life today.

I felt it was part of the spirit of the whole program to do more than simply make an object.