Kenny Hunter
Job title:
Lecturer, Sculpture, School of Art
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Born in Edinburgh in 1962, Kenny Hunter graduated from Sculpture at Glasgow School of Art in 1987 and following that studied classical sculpture at the British School in Athens. In 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Aberdeen University.
He has exhibited extensively both in Britain and abroad including solo shows at Arnolfini 1998, Scottish National Portrait Gallery 2000, CCA Glasgow 2003, Artconnexion, Lille, France 2004, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2006 and Tramway, 2008. Kenny exhibits with and is represented by Galerie Scheffel in Germany and Connersmith in the USA.
His work was included in the Busan Biennale, South Korea in 2008 and the International Sculpture Biennale Blickachsen in 2007, 2009 and 2013 in Germany. This year his work was in a group show titled ‘What am I doing here?’ at the Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Denmark.
Hunter has also created a number of high profile, public commissioned works including; Citizen Firefighter, 2001, outside Glasgow’s Central Station, Youth with split apple, 2005 for Kings College, Aberdeen and iGoat, 2010 in Spitalfields, London.
In 2012 he completed three major public art projects; The Unknown in the rural context of Borgie Forest, Sutherland, and for civic spaces, Stand Easy in Leicester a Post 1945 War Memorial, and The Miners Column for Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
Research interests
- Sculpture
- Public art
- The Monument
- Printmaking
- Art History
Teaching
Kenny has been teaching postgraduate fine art at Edinburgh College of Art since 2006 on a part-time basis.
As well as teaching on the Fine Art - BA (Hons) programme, Kenny teaches on the Sculpture - BA (Hons) programme.
Research
Research
Research interests and activities
Within my work as a sculptor, scepticism and uncertainties play a seminal role. Although I derive inspiration from the past, the subject matter I use draws upon contemporary popular culture - its morals, politics and belief systems.
My works are hybrids that fuse sculptural orthodoxies with postmodern culture. Their aim is to question certainties and stereotypes, introducing a variety of fact and fiction into sculpture that is descriptive but not representational of the ‘real’ world.
The language of the monument is the clearest artistic expression of what Karl Popper identified as historicism; that is to say, the general belief that history must have a plot, a destination, or at any rate a meaning. By articulating the historicist language of the monument within the postmodern climate of reinterpretation, my work seems, at first glance, to invoke the clarity and certainty of its predecessors. Yet, on closer inspection, each work appears as an open question, a homage to doubt. As the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky has said ‘the purpose of art is not to propose solutions, but to set problems in their requisite depth.
