Kilgallen: I’m definitely interested in the past, and in a past that maybe I idealize as a time when things were well-made, and when maybe you couldn’t go to Home Depot to find what you needed but you had to make it on your own. And the thing is often people refer to that as the past, and I don’t really think of it as the past because people still do that all the time today. It’s just often in the city when there’s so many things to look at and so many things going on—you don’t see those things. But I see those things. On any day in the Mission in San Francisco, you can see a hand-painted sign that is kind of funky, and maybe that person, if they had money, would prefer to have had a neon sign. But I don’t prefer that. I think it’s beautiful, what they did and that they did it themselves. That’s what I find beautiful.
art:21: You like to see the touch of someone’s hand.
Kilgallen: Yes, I enjoy seeing—I don’t know how to phrase it. I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don’t project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.
