Rare chance to see work of one of Scotland’s leading sculptors
For 40 years, he has made it his business to engage with the monumental: To study monuments, ask questions of them and also, sometimes, to make them.
Solo shows of his work don’t happen often, as much of his time is spent on public commissions. The provocatively titled Let’s Forget is his first survey show in Edinburgh for more than a decade, a chance to look back on his practice as well as present new, unseen works. It includes sculptures of all sizes, drawings and prints. It’s almost, one might say, a retrospective?
“You’re probably on the money there,” he says, thoughtfully. “I’ve tried to create a sampler, you know? What’s my practice about? Who am I? Because doing public art will make you focus on very particular outcomes, but in an exhibition, the artist is the focus. I’ve tried to represent my practice in its broadest sense.”
Carving out a niche
Hunter is one of Scotland’s pre-eminent sculptors. He has carved out a niche (no pun intended) as a maker of public sculpture in a contemporary style, all smooth forms and clean lines, making work all over the UK and internationally. His subjects are often young people or animals, more often anonymous and symbolic than paying tribute to specific individuals.
His best-known works include Citizen Firefighter near Central Station in Glasgow, Elephant for Glasgow in Bellahouston Park, Blackbird (the persistence of vision) in London’s Leicester Square, and Your Next Breath, an arrangement of four figures for the courtyard of Edinburgh’s Surgeons Hall to commemorate the work of the NHS during the pandemic, which won the 2023 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.
His work is conceptually rigorous and rooted in a deep knowledge; in the course of our conversation, he references widely from classical Greece via Rodin to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. From the choice of materials right down to the base or plinth (if there is one), everything about a sculpture is subjected to careful thought.
He sets out to challenge the ideas inherent in much traditional sculpture: Permanence, commemoration, a fixed, linear progressive view of history. “I guess it’s been my project to try to replace those with compelling questions. The artist’s role is not to provide answers but to set problems in their requisite depth so the question resonates, has an impact on the mind of the viewer.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the art form all my life. I think this exhibition contains that kind of discourse, I’m really happy with it in that respect. It represents my life in art.
That life began at high school in Edinburgh when someone handed him a lump of clay – a work in the show, ‘Clay - The Life’ recalls the moment. “That’s my little origin work. That was the material that got me going as an artist. I just loved the feeling of clay in my hands. It was how I lost myself. I thought, if I could do this all day…” he grins. “Which is a very naive idea of what an artist does.”
Head of sculpture takes up the challenge
At 21, he went to Glasgow School of Art to study sculpture, then on to the British School in Athens. Later becoming head of sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, he has recently quit teaching at the age of 62 to return to the life of a full-time artist.
Throughout his career, he has been committed to challenging the tropes and attitudes of traditional sculpture, for example re-imagining the “self-aggrandising” form of the equestrian monument as a young woman in contemporary clothes astride a Przewalski’s horse, the now-rare wild horse which is regarded as the genetic prototype for modern horses. She rides without saddle or reins so that “there’s almost an agreement between the horse and rider, as opposed to one’s in control of the other”.
However, to make contemporary work for public commissions often involves a lot of negotiation. Another of the works in the show is a version of a sculpture he made for the Aberdeenshire town of Fraserburgh, to commemorate Thomas Blake Glover, a Victorian merchant-adventurer born in the town who is celebrated as a key figure in modern Japan. Instead of the “man with the handlebar moustache standing astride the globe”, he made a statue of a small boy playing with a boat, reflecting the age Glover was when he lived there.
“You have to start off the process by listening, but I also think that I’ve spent the best part of 40 years thinking about sculpture, so I think I should be confident enough to say, ‘This may not be what you thought you wanted, but I think you will like this, and this is why.” He chuckles softly.
“There is that idea that the artist is somehow removed from society, isolated, up in their garret. My experience of being an artist has been such a gift. I’ve met so many people from different walks of life, worked with them, learned from them. I see the gallery as an experimental zone where ideas can be tested. It allows you to build up an identity, but ultimately, I want to take those lessons out into the public art realm.”
Just occasionally, he gets to make a public work which is his and his alone like The Unknown, the 2.5 metre skeleton he placed in Borgie Forest in Sutherland (a version of which is also in the Fine Art Society show).
“I absolutely love that work. That was my idea, supported by Creative Scotland, and I went around trying to find a constituency for it. It’s deliberately awkward to get to. You have to leave your car, you have to become aware of nature before you see the work. You go down a B-Road, and there’s a sign by a dirt track which just says The Unknown, with an arrow. I think that’s amazing,” he laughs. “The unknown what?”
Public sculpture, he says, has the capacity to unite and divide. It can be ignored for decades, then suddenly become “the lightning rod for public discourse” as it did during the Black Lives Matter protests. Hunter was drawn in to the argument about whether or not to remove Henry Dundas, who stands atop a column in St Andrew Square in Edinburgh, because he delayed the passing of anti-slavery legislation in Parliament. (In the end, Dundas stayed in place, although the accompanying interpretation was rewritten).
To make work for the public realm is to engage with questions about what we remember and what we forget, hence this exhibition’s title.
Because the whole point of public sculpture is the remembering, that’s what it’s charged with. I’m not saying remembering’s bad, I’m saying remembering’s appropriate sometimes, but also it could be appropriate to forget as well. And that history, or collective memory, can be misused, can sustain bitterness and stop reconciliation. Ultimately we do forget, as well. There are huge swathes of history we’ve all forgotten.
It also means accepting that the meaning of your work can change. It might become a focus for public gratitude, as Citizen Firefighter did after 9/11 and in the wake of the fires at Glasgow School of Art — or a focus for drunken revellers who want to put a traffic cone on its head.
“It exposes you a little bit as an artist. It’s almost like you’ve given birth to something and you’re leaving it out in the world on its own, it’s not safely wrapped up in a gallery every night. It has to deal with seagull shit and chip wrappers, sticky fingers. It’s not easy, that part of it. But it’s also where I want to work.”
Visit the exhibition
Kenny Hunter: Let’s Forget is at the Fine Art Society, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, from June 14 - August 30.
For more details, visit the website www.thefineartsociety.com