Living a double life

"Hole in my Pocket create work with a lopsided and utterly uncynical charm that makes delighted children out of the most serious of grown-ups." The List

Hole in my Pocket is the practice name of architect and artist Allistair J Burt. As Hole in my Pocket Allistair has worked on a vast range of projects from major exhibitions, illustration, short films, storytelling machines and travelling around Scotland with an air-hostess trolley. In the last couple of years he has started to develop products for retail featuring his illustrations and sense of humour.

"When I first graduated and started working as an Architect I discovered that while it was a fascinating and demanding profession it quite often lacked a proper creative input and the process could be so slow that it could be years for a design to make it from the page to the construction site.

I decided that I needed a creative outlet and formed 'Hole in my Pocket' with the intention of entering design competition. We were delighted to win the first one that we entered (judged by a bit of a hero of mine Cedric Price) and used the prize money to fund a series of art projects/ experiments. For example hiding money in library books, organising a city wide treasure hunt, creating the Small World Experiment and holding an art exhibition of my work."

From there I have been fortunate to always be getting involved in really interesting, unusual and unique art projects and commissions and to be invited to exhibit my work around in various art festivals/ shows.

It was during one of these art shows that I made a limited run of prints and cards, to accompany my commissioned exhibition on 'belief and belonging' to accompany the Glasgow International Festival. This quickly sold out and I started to have the idea that instead of converting my art work into cards etc I should actually designs which were made to be cards/ prints in the first place.

Thankfully people seem to really enjoy my sense of humour and I'm now in a lovely position of having my work stocked in some of my favourite wee stores around the country.

In the summer of 2016 I hung up my Architect's hat to work full time on drawing pictures to make people smile.