Martin Puryear

“I'm interested in a kind of shopping for images, for ideas.”

“I value the bodily knowledge that comes from making things.”

“If you're not at a loss, you're not being honest.”

“There are a lot of things that are latent in a piece of wood. A piece of wood is not a neutral material.”

“The ambition is to make a work of art that is not an illustration of an idea, but an embodiment of an idea.”

“I am not a woodworker. I am a sculptor who works in wood.”

“A lot of my work is a balancing of interests, some of which are formal, some of which are not.”

“I was never a joiner. I was never an ideologue.”

“My work is very much about a negotiation between the hand and the mind.”

“I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world.”

“There's a history in my work of using processes that are not necessarily high-tech.”