EVERY MORNING, KENNY HUNTER gets on his bike and cycles to his studio in Anniesland along the tow path of the Forth & Clyde Canal. It's an in-between place, part post-industrial wasteland, part bucolic riverside, home to swans and kingfishers, abandoned shopping trolleys and underage drinkers.
Hunter's sculptures are typically informed by books and films, but the recent work that is the backbone of his forthcoming solo show at Tramway – his first in Scotland for four years – is inspired by this journey along the canal where nature meets th
e city. There's a fox sitting on top of a wheelie bin, a cat on an old fridge, a pigeon roosting on top of a discarded television.
"Canals are interesting zones because they're a post-industrial landscape which has been reused for everything from jogging to illicit cider drinking," Hunter says. "I'm interested in the way that animals have colonised it. It's an edge, a zone where things overlap. It's quite a brutalised place but still there's beauty and meaning in it."
At present, the sculptures are arranged in a corner of his studio, the draughty, light-filled top floor of a former sweet factory. Hunter works slowly, and this is a body of work spanning several years. Some pieces have been shown before, but Tramway, he believes, will be their "best articulation".
Hunter is unusual in being both a dirt-under-the-fingernails sculptor and a serious ideas man. His studio is the antithesis of the laptop-carrying conceptualist: it's full of machinery and maquettes and dust. A lot of dust. I leave with a fair amount of it attached to my person. But the ideas are no less rigorous.
He is best known for major public commissions such as Citizen Firefighter, outside Central Station, or Girl with Rucksack in the Gorbals, though he also makes work for galleries where he says he can "let the ideas fly a bit more".
Animals have always been important in his work, from Churchill's Dogs to an ape in a space suit. He shows me a maquette of a lion "reclining, at peace" that he has recently entered for a competition for a public commission in Wiesbaden, Germany.
But the animals in the Tramway show are anything but iconic. They are more back alley than civic square. They are the foxes who raid his dustbin, the falcon he spotted gutting a pigeon one day on his journey to work.
"I find our attitudes to animals quite revealing. We do seem to favour animals that are good-looking or rare, pandas or orang-utans because they look like babies. But it may be other animals have even greater significance to the systems of nature. The pigeon, the rat, the fox are all seen as a problem but they're also successful species. In a way they're more like us, they've actually managed to find a place in the world that we inhabit.
"I'm using the animals as a symbol to talk about bigger issues about how we live. Animals can be the most banal artworks or the most revealing, it depends how the artist uses them. A salmon leaping in the river or a stag in the glen are very reassuring images that everything's all right with nature, but a deer on a motorway is a difficult image, it suggests that nature's a little bit out of balance. And how do you feel about a fox eating a kebab? Is that a good thing?"
Of course, there's a point being made here about materialism, a society that consumes relentlessly and throws away almost as much. "I suppose there's a sort of guilt about it. For me it reveals the city as an organism which lives and breathes and excretes and sweats and needs food. When you start to see the city in those terms, it's like a big, frightening machine."
For the first time, Hunter has mixed sculpture with found objects: a flimsy veneer coffee table looks much less substantial than a resin cast of a rubbish bag. A cast of a stack of pizza boxes, minus the labels, starts to look like a piece of abstract modernism worthy of Carl Andre.
"It's quite useful for me to cast a microwave – it strips away a lot of its particularity, its branding, its age. It becomes a symbol of itself. Hopefully this work is not just trying to address social and political issues but look at traditional sculpture through another aperture."
This is perhaps what underlies everything Hunter makes – finding new ways to address the subject of sculpture itself. What is it really for? Does it have a place in the modern world? Growing up in a highly politicised household in Musselburgh in the 1970s, seeing the statues on Princes Street, towering stone figures of heroes and military men, he was both fascinated and angered by them. He still is.
His own work strives to make us think more deeply. Citizen Firefighter has no plinth, and his face is hidden by his breathing apparatus. He is everyman. In a different way, his three-foot tall figure of Margaret Thatcher, cast in resin mixed with coal dust, looks more like a diminutive housewife than a dictator.
His Christ figure, Man Walks Among Us, made as a Millennium commission for St Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow, is dark-skinned and intent. And in 1999, with a foresight that was almost uncanny, he cast a pair of bookends entitled What is History?: on one end, Monica Lewinsky, and on the other, though few people had even heard of him at the time, Osama bin Laden.
It's hardly surprising that Hunter's work engages people, even those who wouldn't readily darken the door of a contemporary art gallery. His influences range from manga cartoons to Ian Hamilton Finlay, ancient Greece to the plastic toys that fall out of breakfast cereal packets.
Public sculpture has always had a public role: Citizen Firefighter became a focus for a union battle to increase firefighters' pay, as well as for tributes in the wake of the Twin Towers. The idea both fascinates and troubles Hunter, who works hard to retain a sense of ambiguity, to resist any hijacking of his work for any political end.
A series of prints he made earlier this year balance the same impulses towards the monumental and the ambiguous. Made at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen, they were launched at Glasgow Art Fair where they promptly sold like hot cakes. They will feature in the Tramway show, pasted on to the walls as if fly-posted, "like an accidental monument".
"It's a bit of a leap, isn't it?" he says, grinning and wiping his hands on his overalls. He opens a drawer to reveal the first work he's made in two dimensions, apologising for the absence of tissue paper and little white gloves.
The idea evolved during a three-month residence at Location 1 in Manhattan. "It was a brilliant residency. The one downside was that they didn't want any noise or any dust in the building and that's what I do every day – make a lot of both. I always had an inkling to try photography or printing, and these were the perfect conditions which afforded me time to look at that. I think artists sometimes waste the opportunity to use print by making a facsimile of their own oil painting or sculpture. I wanted these things to come out of the medium of print."
He produced a series of four text works inspired by reading Baudelaire, Marx and Rousseau. Bright primary colours and clear forms echo the graphics of the modernist era, while strong letters suggest inscriptions in stone, though the words themselves are much less certain. "Things fall apart all over again" says one, riffing on Yeats. "Take a bath in the multitude; adjust your soul with every step" reads another, blending lines from Baudelaire and Rousseau.
"I liked things that were a bit like instructions, but not very strident, more poetic," says Hunter. They look almost like signage, but you expect practical advice from a sign – 'No Entry', 'Take a Right', not 'Take a Bath'. Like all things that look simple, there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind it. With some phrases, it just doesn't work."
Meanwhile, he had a taste of old-fashioned politics in Lille last December, at the unveiling of a public commission for the socialist administration there – a young woman dancing, created to convey something of the great industrial past of the French city, as well as its current regeneration. It stands in Place Pierre Degeyter, a square named to commemorate the man who composed the music for the Internationale.
"They wanted something celebratory, joyous. I'd never done anything remotely happy," Hunter says, smiling. "It was a real old-fashioned unveiling, with a cloth and a band, and the mayor there to kiss me on both cheeks. It was a really successful work, but probably one of the most hard fought-over ones. The French are brilliant, because they have such strong opinions.
"I welcome that negotiation process about public artwork, but it is frustrating sometimes. It has given me an acute appreciation of the gallery scene. If I keep doing public art projects and gallery shows, it keeps me quite positive about both worlds and they feed off each other.
"I guess I support the notion of ideas with intelligence in art, that's what will ultimately give it value. Much as I am a dirty-finger-nail type sculptor, I don't think hard work alone can redeem a bad artwork."
• Kenny Hunter: A Shout in the Street is at Tramway, Glasgow, 12 July until 23 August.
The full article contains 1627 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
