"So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine." -Alice Munro, "Walker Brothers Cowboy" (1968)

ABOUT top

Duncan Hewitt

Duncan Hewitt is a sculptor. He remakes and replaces things that are important to him. They reappear as touchstones that exist in real and imagined space and are both sculptures and objects. Most are made of carved and painted wood.

Hewitt was born in New York City in 1949 and grew up on Long Island. He attended Colby College and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives and works in the Portland area of Maine. His work has been shown with prominent 20th century artists such as Joseph Beuys, Joseph Cornell, Isamu Noguchi and 21 century artists including, for example, Susan Collis, Vik Muniz and Nina Katchadourian.

He is associated with the ICON Gallery of Contemporary Art in Brunswick, Maine. In addition to his ongoing body of work he has completed five public art projects.

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I make things by hand – touching. I remake found objects or events, sometimes altering them and sometimes hardly even doing that. Often, I move towards the subject, carefully disappearing into it before I find my place. It pleases me when something is matter-of-fact and emotional, as particular to its source as it is to something else.