Hasan Kale’s work
“Small and mighty” - By Michaela Hall
It can often be thought that the most powerful things are those that are the biggest, especially when it comes to an artwork, a massive ten-foot canvas with big flashes of colour or an installation that takes over the whole gallery space. For this reason, through their careers a lot of artists, as they get more resource and recognition tend to scale upwards and be more ambitious in the size of their works. However, this isn’t always the case and there are the few that focus on scaling down, seeking to get the same punch and impact from something as small as a marble or a coin, something small and mighty. Turkish artist Hasan Kale takes this approach to the extreme. You may ask yourself how much of a painting you could actually create on something as small as a nut or a seed, and the guess might be that it would have to be a very basic painting lacking detail. However, Kale proves everybody wrong by creating detailed and complex landscape paintings on the tiny things we recognise from the everyday. The detail is incredible and creates a whole new relationship with objects we may usually not find that interesting, drawing us in to inspect them in a new way. Kale has previously said that the motivation behind his work is down to his love for transforming micro-objects that we ignore and pass over in our daily lives”. In the images below you can see that Kales canvases range from everything from a smartie to a slice of banana and an almond nut, creating new mini worlds captured within each.
Nick Joly’s work
British artist Nic Joly also shares this fascination for all things tiny. He is known for creating small, often humorous sculptures that deal with everyday situations, re-framing something we experience in full scale to something micro. Joly has been quoted to say that his “Fascination with creating small sculptures inspired by the theatre of life has grown into an absolute obsession” and it is perhaps this attention to turning life micro that allows his sculptures to be so relatable despite their tiny scale. In ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’ a play on the well-known saying, we see a fountain pen more like a gigantic rocket sat on two tiny
figures being squished trying to hold the mighty pen up. Similarly, in his piece ‘Heavy Addiction’, we see a tiny little figure holding up what seems like the weight of the world, but it’s just a regular sized cigarette. What both artists do is celebrate the power of the tiny, the impact changing something’s scale can have on our perception and intrigue into wanting to know more. Elevating the everyday cigarette, pen, almond or smartie to something that has a story of it’s own and an impact much bigger than its actual size, something truly small and mighty to behold.
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‘It’ll make you blind!’ Miniatures, Secrecy & Scandal’ By Nancy Isherwood
https://www.njisherwood.co.uk/gallery
In some ways, miniatures make the real world bigger by allowing us humans to play as voyeurs and curious gods overlooking a more malleable and manageable world. The roof (and maybe a wall or two) can be removed from a room to give easy access to an interfering hand and an all-seeing eye. Usually only natural disasters or bombs tear open homes so eerily. More often for me though, miniatures close down the big bad world around them. The act of viewing something so much smaller than life invites a shielding hand to blinker the surroundings from other prying eyes, like a schoolchild wrapping an arm around a spelling test, to keep the scales separate, secluded. To keep things private. To keep the secret. Privacy and secrecy tread a fine line, and in the Internet age this line is often blurred beyond recognition. Artifice, confession, construction and revelation all play out daily in our hands - in a society immersed in mass communication what once might have been shocking or scandalous is now explored, documented and discussed in minute detail. I am quite a private person, open and honest, but not filtered by social media. Secrecy and miniatures have always gone hand in hand. From scandal to spycraft, the ability to make things tiny has always solicited intrigue. Technology allowed the world to shrink and advances in micro-photography allowed for image reproduction at a smaller and smaller and smaller scale. As with most technological advances there were two industries eager to peer in first; pornography and war. Sex and death are always ahead of the crowd to capture and exploit progress. Many a big screen has shown the importance of tiny documents to the military and espionage - tiny messages carried by birds and microfilm smuggled across borders. The Spy That Loved Me traded seduction for scaled-down submarine tracking schematics. But perhaps less known than its role in State Security is the history of microphotography & miniature pornography. When photography was developing in the 19th century, it wasn’t long before someone used it to create erotic images. And as microphotography made images small enough to hide in your palm, it wasn’t long before pornography would be secreted into everyday objects too - hidden in cigarette cases and lighters, penknives and pocket-watch winders, generally in items targeted at men though not exclusively used by them. Carrying a tiny glass slide of an illicit moment to be peeped at, without anyone else being able to see the image, became a risqué Victorian trend - a private peek was possible, even in a public place. Who knows what politicians sneaked in to view in the House of Commons back then… As a contemporary miniature artist, I found this secretive trade of Victorian erotica fascinating and an eye-opening pull from the big loud world, so brashly destroying itself around us. I painted a series of 3cm bottletop pieces working with reference to the Kinsey Institute and other archive images showing illicit (for the era) posed images. When people view my work they do so individually, even if the room is crowded. Miniature work can’t be understood from the other side of a crowded gallery, nor can a live miniature exhibition be glimpsed from pictures of the event. From even a short distance it is just a small object on a big wall so you need to be there and you need to look carefully. The viewer must to be invited to lean in, to be up close and personal with the work to grasp its detail, humour or weight. The viewer needs to stand just ahead of the crowd to see it. As with all miniature work, the process puts strain on the eyes. People ask if painting hurts my eyes or gives me a headache, and people viewing my work often comment on the conscious effort to focus their vision on marks so minuscule… so a nod to the old, pious warning about blindness seems uniquely apt as a title for this work.
Artist Peter Devonald
Website: http://www.scriptfirst.com/ Instagram: @peterdevonald
Title: “i”
Description: A visual poem that explores the power of the infinitesimal. A diamond shaped poem like an eye, watching, the unlimited universe. Small things can roar; and we should listen.
Short bio: Peter Devonald is a poet and screenwriter living in Manchester. 2022 selected for The Poetic Map of Reading project and the Chronically Online/ Culturable/ Layered Onion Group Show. 2022 published in haus-a-rest deconstruction and haus-a-rest Dada/ Surrealist, Substantially Unlimited: Stigma, Dwell Time Press, Tales of the Underbanks (3rd in award), Bolton Breakdown: reawakening, Heaton Post, Cheadle Post and Didsbury Post. 20 previous publications. 2021 Heart of the Heatons best poetry winner. Multi-award-winning screenwriter inc. Children’s Bafta nominated and 150 screenings. Formerly senior judge/ mentor Peter Ustinov Awards (iemmys).
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Big Things come in Small Packages
Written by: Matthew Tett
As a child, I loved the miniature world experienced by Mrs Pepperpot, the fictional character invented by Norwegian writer Alf Prøysen. And who could forget The Borrowers, Mary Norton’s tiny family? But it is not just the 1950s that provided such miniscule joys. Art on a small scale has become popular again and visiting the Small is Beautiful exhibition in London this spring has definitely whetted my appetite.
We often think of art as being big, eye-catching, attention-grabbing. We stand back, awe-struck, at huge paintings adorning gallery walls; we marvel at the sweeping brush strokes, the seemingly impossible task of creating art on such a large scale. But, small art is just as inspiring. In fact, producing teeny-tiny pieces is, in some ways, even more incredible.
I did not really know what to expect from the exhibition – it has been on display in an inconspicuous gallery in London’s South Kensington between April and July 2022. Something about the social media advertisement grabbed my eye, though. The exhibition contains 143 miniature artworks from all over the world. There are stunning dioramas, of fire-lit cross-sections of grand stately homes, of laden rafts bobbing about on a choppy sea. It is easy to imagine such scenes on a large scale. However, the reality of much of what I saw seemed virtually impossible to create. I suspect, like many, I stood, open-mouthed, gazing at what has been created.
Some pieces are simple, almost-empty boxes, with a stick-like figure flying across a stunning blue-sky backdrop. One particular artwork was a normal pencil – its tip, though, is ornately and intricately crafted into a bejewelled hand. I was particularly impressed by tiny, crocheted creatures perched inside thimble-sized glass domes, secured by a little cork. A tree-hanging sloth was particularly cute. It never fails to amaze me how artists create such wonderful work. For one thing, they must be patient, and incredibly dexterous and nimble-fingered.
Miniature art is not new. The Small is Beautiful exhibition, organised by Encore and Fever, has brought its wonders to the fore for many, though. Simon Garfield’s 2018 book, In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World, does exactly that – it highlights for readers who small is often beautiful, how one can find marvels in the smallest of things. Much of this is about perspective – and I saw this at the exhibition, with ordinary objects being focused on in close-up to completely transform their appearance. For many, a pile of pencils is just that – a desk accessory. However, at the exhibition, they were transformed into a monstrous curling wave, being surfed by an artist-pallet-and-paintbrush-wielding Lego character. Around every corner, I saw something different, something unexpected, and this, to me, is what art should do: it should surprise, stun and send the ‘viewer’ away with plenty to think about.
One of my favourite art books is Skyshades: Sixty Small Paintings by Fanny Brennan. In the Foreword, Calvin Tomkins asks ‘Who can resist the lure of the small?’ I couldn’t agree more. In this pocket-sized book, there is a swing hanging from a cloud, and a hot-air balloon seen through a walnut shell hovering over the sea. Most of these are just a few inches square – but so much can be appreciated from such tiny works of art.
I love the miniature, the tiny, the small. Nature provides such beauties everywhere, from the intricacies of baby snail shells, through to the glorious details found in plants. Sometimes, it can be tricky to see what is hidden; nevertheless, it is usually worth searching to undercover things that otherwise can be easily missed. It is true that big things come in small packages – one just needs to be patient and prepared to open the eyes to what isn’t obvious.