Material Manipulation Quotes

I have always been interested in materials and in transforming them.

For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects.

The impulse for me to want to make sculpture is because I want to make statements, really, on a purely emotional level. And it's also somewhat of a challenge to see how that can be done with materials and objects that really are not emotional, in and of themselves.

The debut show, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There’s good work here, but much of what’s on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building, too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement.

Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.

It's so important to work with material you can really mold and milk and create and evolve.

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel.

Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world.

I think it's important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly. To understand the properties you're working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

Each material is only what we make it.

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

I don't compose. I assemble materials.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

As designers, we do so much with material and construction. It's really architectural; it comes close to building. A scent is so immaterial. It's really about emotion and sensation. Clothes are too, but it's not the same.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

My forte is editing and I am most experienced in that. I love the challenge of playing with material and imagination while editing.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don't understand.

We'll get material in there and all of a sudden I'll switch the material around or the order of the show.

It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is to work with this and that material or manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions.