Dance in Palo Santo

In Dance in Palo Santo, artist William Hunter responds to the rippling texture of the wood grain, carving flowing flutes into a wide and smooth vessel. Having a sense of movement is important to Hunter’s artistic practice; in the artist’s own words, “Sculpturing different rhythmic arrangements and their relationships to form allows me to energize surface and space with different implied forces, convey different feelings and help the material sing.” Hunter developed a method of lathe-working while the wood is wet and specialized carving instruments in the 1980s in order to achieve this effect. It is a method that he continues to use and develop across multiple series.