Geoff Allan is an Edinburgh based artist who specialises in collage, using a combination of found material and his own digital images. He has held two sell-out solo exhibitions and earlier this year undertook a three month Artist in Residence scholarship at the Las Cuevas Tropical Research Station in Belize. He is currently working from a studio space at Coburg House Art Studios in Leith, and will be holding a retrospective at their open Christmas event which is being held between the 4th and 6th of December.
Head and shoulders of Geoff Allan with sunglasses on his scalp in Belize Once I get started talking about my work its difficult to get me off the subject so I’m conscious of keeping this as brief as possible. Fortunately the idea is pretty simple. I make composite images and ‘assemblage’ on particular themes, using materials collected from a wide range of sources, including magazines, newspapers, calendars, and also incorporating my own photographs. The subtlety of the composite pictures lies in the strict adherence to a simple rule that only one square is taken from each piece of source material. This means that although the final images look familiar they don’t actually exist.

The assemblage pictures have varying levels of complexity, depending on the amount of material I have available to incorporate within the final image. Inspired by a magazine cover design commission I completed in December 2008, the majority of the artwork I created while I was in Belize follows clean, simplified templates. Conversely, a picture I finished of last year's Edinburgh Festival 'A Festival Affair (2008), has a more complex series of internal rules and construction ideas that need explanation before the viewer is able to get a better understanding of the piece.

Below are a series of slideshows that illustrate the process involved in constructing three of the composite pictures. In the final slideshow 'I'm a Celebrity', I have included a number of the original images used in the final work. I know that there is more than one square cut out of a few of the pictures but believe me in the final composition only one is used! Among other things, the slideshow discloses that the picture's central feature is actually a combination of Boris Johnston's and David Beckham's noses. I don't know if that means that there is a subconscious link in any way to their involvement in the London 2012 Olympics, but I suppose it does highlight the fact that they were both in the news when I was creating the picture, giving it a kind of temporal stamp.

I have twelve limited edition prints available for sale, and I also accept commissions. For more details, or to make any other comments, please get in touch via the contact page.

Thanks for taking an interest in the site,
Cheers

Geoff Allan
November 2009