Alexander Pollard

Alexander James Pollard is an artist and researcher working across painting, graphic narrative, and expanded material practices. His work explores divergent world-making through composite painting, experimental writing, and cut-up processes, producing unstable narrative systems and alternative visual logics.

He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD titled The Self-Producing Vortex: Cut-Up, Fiction, and Authorial Drift in Contemporary Art Practice, which takes the form of a graphic novel developed through a generative and process-led methodology, mixing AI-enhanced creative processes with traditional collage techniques. The research investigates outsider aesthetics, anti-taste, and recursive narrative structures, treating image and text as co-evolving experimental systems. Central to this work is a self-producing methodology in which visual and textual elements continuously generate and transform one another, challenging fixed authorship and linear narrative.

This methodology has supported a recent expansion of Pollard’s practice into mosaic and other crafting methods. Here, processes of fragmentation, accumulation, and material disruption are translated into a modular form of image construction, extending key concerns from his painting practice into new “folk art meets tech” material and site-sensitive outputs.

Pollard’s broader research includes work in zines, graphic novels, and collaborative publishing. Notable projects include Aleister Crowley and Charles Dawson: The Order of the Dawn Man (2022), produced with Luke Pendrell using a cut-up, postal art process to explore speculative and esoteric histories. Other titles include The Tangent Factory and Concrete Dream Slang – both experimental works that employ cut-up and recursive production techniques.

He represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and has exhibited internationally, including at La Plate-forme, Dunkerque; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; and Luhring Augustine, New York. His work is held in public collections including Arts Council England, the Scottish National Gallery, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Government Art Collection. His work is also held in private collections in Japan, Italy, Greece, USA, Germany, China.

Pollard studied BA (Hons) Painting and Drawing at the Glasgow School of Art and completed an MPhil at Goldsmiths College, London. His MPhil thesis is titled A Genealogy of Bad Painting – Legacies, Soft Objects and Networks is available online as a download. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Painting and MA Fine Art at the University of Brighton.