Keith Pettit
"Keith Pettit is a woodcut artist, sculptor and printmaker inspired by the landscapes and legends of his Sussex home. Ranging from tiny woodcuts to monumental sculpture, his work is a testament to the human relationship to place.”
Justin Hopper
Keith's Story
​“For Keith, wood engraving is a balance of control and instinct, technical discipline and creative intuition. The thread that runs through all of Keith’s work is his deep connection to place, to the land, to history – both the grand and the everyday. One of the defining features of Keith’s engravings is his treatment of light. Fireworks, lens flares, sunbursts – all captured in stark black and white. With his focus on reflected light, his latest works play with it, carving out negative space with an almost cinematic quality. The contrast between shadows and highlights, the way light dances across different textures – these are the things that drive his compositions.”
Pressing Matters magazine
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The art of Keith A. Pettit is rooted in the natural world. His native Sussex, with its history and landscape of weald, woodland, chalk, farmland and coast, informs and shapes his sculpture.
Frequently working with found wood, Pettit immerses himself in a process of seeking and revealing sculptural form, using techniques such as carving, chain-sawing, burning and oiling.
‘I find something that already exists in there. I try and work in the most natural way, to tune into the seasons and moon phases.’
The resulting sculpture communicates a love of materials, a deep knowledge of tree species and an awareness of the beauty and lifecycle of nature.
His most cherished artworks are those with substance, something with nature’s depths woven in. His urge to tell a story often finds expression not only in the properties of the wood but also in its intended site so that it feels almost like the environment has conspired to create the object, rather than having something imposed on the site.