Martin Puryear quotes:

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.

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

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.

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.

I think of moving as a kind of saving grace.

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

I'm interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades.

The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand.

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.

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.