Scottish carver in stone and wood, letter-cutter and musician, he is believed to have been born in Germany, to a family of master wood turners. He studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, and was active in Edinburgh until c. 1990, when he moved to the Hebridean island of Muck and devoted himself to manufacturing small pipes. He began exhibiting finely crafted wooden artefacts in 1974, and was later employed by the cabinet makers Whytock & Reid, for whom he carved crests for the Thistle Chapel. He had workshops in Craigmillar and Wallyford, East Lothian, and undertook numerous carving commissions, including the replacement of the decayed crockets on the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, in the 1980s. He returned to the mainland from Muck c. 2010, and lived for the remainder of his life in Fort William.
Source: information from Benjamin Tindall, Gardner Molloy, Bob Heath and other former colleagues of Ian Ketchin.
Bibliography: R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 442, 468.
Ray McKenzie 2018