RALPH KIGGELL – LIFE LINES
Woodblock Prints and Paper Cuts
JUNE 20 – JULY 22 2018
Ralph Kiggell is a British artist now based in Thailand. He studied traditional Japanese woodblock techniques in Japan, teaches extensively in Thailand and has undertaken artist residencies in England, Ireland, China, Thailand and Japan.
In 2017 Ralph Kiggell was Vice Chair of the International Mokuhanga Conference at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Honolulu and is an editorial consultant of the international journal Printmaking Today which he also guest edited in the Spring of 2017.
Ralph Kiggell writes about his work. An artist creates fictions, yet I am fascinated in the truths claimed by science. I learn digestible facts about biology, evolution, rainfall and the planets, for example, from television documentaries, New Scientist and from layman books. The close-up imagery that illustrates these scientific truths — of cells, seeds or insect movement, say — is fascinating. Through print and papercut, I make my own pictorial versions, creating a microcosmic moment or inventing organisms inside which lines writhe or radiate in shimmering fractals from a nucleus.
But a few years ago, I was also a resident artist at Papworth Cardiothoracic Hospital in Cambridge, England, where I was able to learn something about the realities of medical diagnosis through radiology and clinical pathology and to observe the marvelous drama of heart and lung surgery as it happened.
In response to these investigations, but without wishing to make an exact record of what I have seen, and from the advantage point of an artist, I create my own vision of an extraordinary world as if seen through a microscope. I take up my knives and brushes as the tools of dissection and analysis, and my woodblocks become the petri dishes. I then transpose my findings onto the paper’s surface. For my papercuts, I use actual surgical scalpels to make incisions.
The resulting images imagine a range of life-forms from sophisticated to simple, multicellular to single cell, macro to micro, animal to vegetable, so that the gallery space becomes a working laboratory, a place of record and discovery.