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Fulcrum

You might easily miss Fulcrum in the gallery because it is installed well overhead. It is a five and a half foot long, narrow sculpture extending horizontally from the wall. Like an abstracted quill, it is two shapes, reminiscent of top and bottom bird beaks that point away from each other instead of hinging correctly. It is mounted just a few feet below the ceiling as if piercing the wall at a ninety degree angle. Bryan Hunt sculpted fulcrum in 1990 from spruce and balsa and then covered it with synthetic fiber, patinated copperleaf and paint.

From below, Fulcrum is sharp at both ends with a very slight curve that widens to 8 inches. The end touching the wall is covered in the patinated copperleaf, giving it an irregular pale turquoise finish. A little less than halfway, there is a clean abrupt switch to a matte blue finish. The blue side is both slightly longer and pointier than the turquoise end.

Viewed from the side, the turquoise side has a central ridge that curves down and flat at the top, like the bottom beak of a sparrow. The blue side is longer and pointier, with a flat bottom and a long gradual curve at the top, like a stork’s top beak. Where they meet near the center, the flat blue bottom and the flat turquoise top share the same plane. The blue top has a convex curve that carries through the flat plane to become a convex curve on the turquoise bottom.

This point where they meet, the eponymous fulcrum is sculpted to be extremely thin to give the impression that it is a three dimensional representation of a mathematical curve going through an axis.