Earlier this year in May and August, we were delighted to welcome RSA Residencies for Scotland artist Jodi Le Bigre to SSW. Below, Jodi shares an introduction to the work she developed during her residency and reflects on her time at SSW.
SSW is excited to be participating in the RSA Residencies for Scotland programme again, to offer one artist a 1-2 month(s)-long funded residency in 2026. For more information and to apply, visit The RSA website.
Deadline: Sunday 18 January 2026, 5pm
Words below by Jodi Le Bigre, images by Felicity Crawshaw.
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My work grows out of an interest in how we, as individuals and as collectives, position ourselves within our changing natural environments. My practice is informed by investigations into scientific thought and the disciplinary developments of natural history, as well as by invented concepts such as ‘natural resources’, ‘exploration’, and ‘wilderness’. Working as a printmaker, as I normally do, means working in a medium which, due to its close relationship to text, provides a clear pathway to the historical concepts, ideologies, and worldviews that have shaped our current ones. I find that often this distance is helpful in considering that which is immediately before us.
Coming to SSW was a chance for me to experiment with new materials and methods and expand outward from my background in printmaking into sculptural techniques. I was excited to have a chance to work on the creation of functional sculptures capable of printing fields of automatic texts. It was important to me too that the sculptures should be sized in a human scale so they could be hand-held and easily operated by turning one’s wrist or rolling the sculpture across a surface.
The work grew out of research into deep sea lifeforms and old scientific illustrations of fossil corals, which provided a clearer view of the forms I wanted to focus on. Before arriving, I made drawings of the forms I’d dreamed up and a couple of rudimentary printable sculptures from lithographic limestone, which is a familiar material for me. Those preliminary sculptures, coral-like in shape, utilised lithographic processes to print letters. Lithographic processes are planographic (printed from a flat surface) which made them somewhat challenging three dimensional printing objects, but my hope was to extend this by exploring connections between relief and intaglio printmaking and casting, focussing on form, rather than chemistry.
At SSW I worked in both the ceramics workshop and the metal workshop, sometimes the sole person on residency, other times working alongside other solo residents or melding in with larger group residencies. I learnt so much from everyone at SSW, the technicians Amy Benzie and Ruaridh Allen, of course, but also the whole staff team and all of the other incredible artists who I worked alongside. Each way of working offered its own learning and its own rhythms. A major part of the process was coming to terms with the schedules imposed by the techniques themselves: the longer timescales of kiln firings and drying times in ceramics vs. the fast bursts of work in the metal workshop.
As a result of my truly wonderful residency at SSW, I have a new set of tools for making work in the months ahead. There are metal forms that I will take back into the printmaking workshop to etch as well as ceramic prototypes and casts that I can start experimenting with right away. I look forward to seeing how these sculptures will operate and where this project will go next.
