Martin Puryear Quotations

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.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

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

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

The work is flowing from an inner knowing of how things really are.

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.

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

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.

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.

The design is a public amenity, designed by a sculptor, which tries to invest a public facility with a bit more poetry than it otherwise might have.