Geoffrey Farmer (born Vancouver, 1967) produces sculptural works that are a result of intense periods of research and collecting.

At the beginning of his residency Farmer worked through Edinburgh Printmaker’s vast archive of documents, printed material and bric-a-brac, accumulated over 45 years and housed in the basement of the studio’s current home. His selection of material from this archive was seemingly arbitrary, but many elements had a personal resonance or revealed an obscure history and forgotten story.

‘Working with printmaker Jessica Crisp, Farmer experimented with some of the photo-based processes used in printmaking, scanning found fragments from the archive and then printing them using photo-litho and screenprinting. He also screenprinted on to old aluminium plates, a process that allowed him to cut the images into shapes and assemble them into free standing sculptures.

In parallel with this, Farmer embarked on a series of works prompted by a particularly appropriate discovery, in one of the city’s second-hand bookshops, of a 1967 copy of ‘The Traveler’s Book of Colour Photography’. He cut and shaped a selection of images from this publication, scanning them on both sides to create screenprinting separations that were then printed front and back on to aluminium plates. Farmer has subsequently worked on these plates in Canada, cutting each shape to form the final printed sculptures.’[1]

[1] Alastair Clark, Edinburgh Printmakers