Press

In his knowing practice, the Glasgow-based artist Alex Pollard redirects attention from the gallery to the studio, creating gangly sculptures that appear to be made out of studio tools and debris - pencils, discarded pieces of cardboard, rubbers - but are in fact fashioned from the more durable and eminent materials of bronze or plaster. He celebrates the process of making art: the fits and starts, the potential for failure and the freedom failure affords. Rather than using tools to make new objects, they are valued as things in themselves. Twisted out of functionality, a ruler is cast in plaster, with useless measurements painted meticulously. Pencils and compasses assemble themselves into spindly figures, anorexic brontosauruses, skeletal hands, ageing bureaucrats and regal birds - a cast of malnourished beasts. The works engineer a delicate balance between the near-invisibility of the work on display and the permanence of his material. His site-specific works exploit this effect, posing his elegant, spare material in sites that are better known for catering to bombastic work: the Frieze Art fair, the Venice Biennale. (Pollard represented Scotland at the last Biennale and will again this year.) At the 2006 Scottish pavilion he showed a wall drawing - which could not be a more succinct assessment of the work on display. Thin lines curved on the wall until they met the tools that made them: rulers and compasses, which were arranged in the shape of a hand. In the staging of the process of making the work, the tools themselves became representational, a reversal he accomplishes in his portraits as well. At his first London solo show, at the Reliance gallery in 2006, he made a portrait of doodles across a canvas that seemed to accumulate and transform back into the pencils that drew them; the outline of the face was derived not from the doodles but from the arrangement on the canvas of the pencils themselves. Pollard’s illuionism is deceptively modest: his subject is the process of making art, and what it’s like to be an artist, in the studio, with the detritus of possibility littering the floor.