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Artist Alex Pollard tells Susan Mansfield how David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes inspired his work

Alex Pollard is bleary eyed. He had a late night in the studio before we met – one of many. An unavoidable consequence of creating a solo show from scratch in one of the larger contemporary art spaces in Scotland.

Pollard’s forthcoming show at Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery will be his biggest solo show in Scotland to date, and his first on home turf since he was part of the team who went from Scotland to the Venice Biennale in 2005. Just 29, he has taken part in shows in Madrid, London and New York since showing in Venice.

‘Being at the Biennale has impacted a lot,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think it would, necessarily, but it has. It definitely contributed to getting work shown elsewhere. The Biennale is one of the shows that everybody in the art world sees.’

Pollard’s work in the Venice show, Selective Memory, stood out for marrying a craftsmanlike meticulousness with a playful touch. He built creatures which looked like homespun schoolboy models made of rulers, but were actually crafted from plaster, wood and metal and painted to create this effect. In the show which subsequently appeared at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the ruler-dinosaurs were followed by a family of animals which appeared to be made from pencils.

‘After that I felt I’d exhausted making work with rulers,’ says Pollard, a graduate in painting from Glasgow School of Art. His Talbot Rice show, Black Marks, will be very different. ‘I wanted to push what I was doing, I didn’t want to do a bigger version of another show that I’d done. I think it’s important to keep learning new skills. A new material can throw a spanner in the works, create different possibilities. The reason I started to make art in the first place was that I wanted to do something interesting. I don’t want to be in a place where I know exactly how everything will turn out. I want to keep it interesting for myself and hopefully other people.’

So, armed with a pile of books and a David Bowie video, Pollard went on a residency to the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in the north-east village of Lumsden. Watching Bowie’s legendary Ashes to Ashes from 1980, in which he casts himself as Pierrot the sad-eyed clown, he was able to connect his love of the music of the New Romantics with a wider realm of artistic ideas and connections. ‘I wanted to bring in some ideas that I’m interested in outside the studio. Having that time in Lumsden was really important, the quietness to be able to sit and think about what I really want to do. I went on to read every book I could find about Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte and clowns in general.’

Meanwhile he learned how to cast vast bronze medallions a metre across: there are five of them in the show, featuring Pierrot, clowns and jester type figures. Then, back in Glasgow, he got busy with lipstick, a photocopier and a set of visual references – from Leigh Bowery’s dressing-up box, to a 16th-century Italian artist with a penchant for fruit and vegetables.

In the background lies a story of Pierrot, an ancient tale of a naked child found at the gates of heaven. St Peter gives him white clothes and names him with his own name, but warns that if he plays with the other children he won’t be allowed back in. Pierrot does, of course; he comes back covered in black marks, and is condemned.

‘I was interested in Pierrot because it is ambiguous,’ says Pollard. ‘The medallions have a quality to them which is really odd – they have that ambiguity that a clown has. Sometimes a clown can seem quite ridiculous, at other times really sad.’

Next to the medallions he plans a wall drawing, perhaps as much as 40ft long, created with make-up and giant ‘surrealist’ pencils. There will be ‘paintings’ developed using make-up, and ‘portraits’ developed using make-up containers resized and distorted on the photocopier. There’s a nod to the 16th-century Italian who painted faces composed of vegetables and fruit – Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

‘Basically, I’ve been enjoying myself,’ Pollard says, guiltily – as if he’s worried that I’ll report him to the art mafia for having a good time at work. ‘Watching Bowie doing Ashes to Ashes, I got the idea that he was thinking about his own representation, that he used the character of Pierrot as a mask.

‘I like the way he reinvents an older musical language, throws in elements like I’m doing with Arcimboldo – older things that are seen as slightly embarrassing but give it a kind of edge.’

The idea of drawing with lipstick and eye-liners might be artistically unconventional, but it is entirely in keeping with the ethos of New Romanticism. ‘I tend to find materials interesting if there’s an element that surprises you in what they do. Although now I know the material so well that when I close my eyes I see lipstick.’