Melvin Edwards

"Though it’s [the sculpture] laid down flat, you can turn it this way or that way and look at it in a comprehensive, three-dimensional way. And you don’t have to decide what’s the front or back in the beginning. Though I think fairly early on, most times, I decide that pretty early. But later on, I found I could start out one way, and it looked very definitely like ‘this is the front, that’s the top,’ and then I’d reverse it or change the angles. And then you’ve got a totally different set of sculptural dynamics. So, reconfiguring, tilting, reversing, and coming back tomorrow and thinking about it in a totally different way was a part of things. Especially because I was improvising always. You know, I didn’t have drawings to go by, didn’t want drawings to go by. I only wanted to go by what the work was giving me itself." 

(Melvin Edwards, Quoted in Nasher Sculpture Center’s Conversations with Melvin Edwards)