Paphos 2013 | Photo J.Harding
‘If Rigden was a quiet master of anti-pattern patterning, he was also an anti-virtuosity virtuoso and an anti-craft craftsman. Not for a scorn for these qualities or a programmatic rejection of them (though his work is more straightforwardly anti-heroic). Rather because, despite an obvious involvement with high art, throughout there is a sense of an inveterate scavenger and improviser, a strangely purposeful tinkering with what was to hand…
Humour is both a relief from the works’ difficulty and somehow bound up with it. A clipped curve jauntily occupies space, while a circle loses just enough of its abstractness to become a head or a face, looking back at us with something like an insouciant simplicity or an absurdist defiance. Elsewhere, wit comes from the offbeat audacity of Rigden’s solutions. The works are full of smile-inducing weird decisions, odd nips and tucks. Toughness and ugliness guard against the whimsical and the ingratiating. It is difficult to know whether we are fully in on the joke but somehow this never seems a problem.’
Sam Cornish
Studio International | 11 July 2016
The studio at APT, Deptford | Photo S.Jaques
In the studio at Lemba 2013 | Photo J.Harding
Paphos 2013 | Photo J.Harding
‘If Rigden was a quiet master of anti-pattern patterning, he was also an anti-virtuosity virtuoso and an anti-craft craftsman. Not for a scorn for these qualities or a programmatic rejection of them (though his work is more straightforwardly anti-heroic). Rather because, despite an obvious involvement with high art, throughout there is a sense of an inveterate scavenger and improviser, a strangely purposeful tinkering with what was to hand…
Humour is both a relief from the works’ difficulty and somehow bound up with it. A clipped curve jauntily occupies space, while a circle loses just enough of its abstractness to become a head or a face, looking back at us with something like an insouciant simplicity or an absurdist defiance. Elsewhere, wit comes from the offbeat audacity of Rigden’s solutions. The works are full of smile-inducing weird decisions, odd nips and tucks. Toughness and ugliness guard against the whimsical and the ingratiating. It is difficult to know whether we are fully in on the joke but somehow this never seems a problem.’
Sam Cornish
Studio International | 11 July 2016
The studio at APT, Deptford | Photo S.Jaques
In the studio at Lemba 2013 | Photo J.Harding
Paphos 2013 | Photo J.Harding
‘If Rigden was a quiet master of anti-pattern patterning, he was also an anti-virtuosity virtuoso and an anti-craft craftsman. Not for a scorn for these qualities or a programmatic rejection of them (though his work is more straightforwardly anti-heroic). Rather because, despite an obvious involvement with high art, throughout there is a sense of an inveterate scavenger and improviser, a strangely purposeful tinkering with what was to hand…
Humour is both a relief from the works’ difficulty and somehow bound up with it. A clipped curve jauntily occupies space, while a circle loses just enough of its abstractness to become a head or a face, looking back at us with something like an insouciant simplicity or an absurdist defiance. Elsewhere, wit comes from the offbeat audacity of Rigden’s solutions. The works are full of smile-inducing weird decisions, odd nips and tucks. Toughness and ugliness guard against the whimsical and the ingratiating. It is difficult to know whether we are fully in on the joke but somehow this never seems a problem.’
Sam Cornish
Studio International | 11 July 2016
The studio at APT, Deptford | Photo S.Jaques
In the studio at Lemba 2013 | Photo J.Harding
