During the late 1970s and 1980s, Bryan Hunt suffused his work with narrative and imagery that were pointedly counter to the aesthetics and critical concerns of minimal art, dominant in the era. Daphne I references the water nymph Daphne, the daughter of a river god in Greek mythology. Pursued by the amorous Apollo, she begged her father for help, and he transformed her into a laurel tree. Hunt’s twisted bronze, placed atop a limestone plinth, suggests a straining body without departing from abstraction. It is one in a series that grew from the artist’s study of lakes, quarries, and waterfalls. Hunt likens the movement of water to the transformation of bronze from liquid to solid or the metamorphosis of Daphne’s human form into that of a tree.