Artist Statement

Jim Holyoak’s Artist Statement

“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters. Fantasy united with reason is the mother of the arts, and a source of wonders.”

– Francisco Goya

My work explores the bridges and boundaries between perception, memory and fantasy, through drawing, writing and installation. What we remember, imagine, and think about has powerful effects on how we feel, how we perceive the world, and on our behaviour. This is what prevents me from dismissing the imaginary as unreal.

During the last dozen years I have amassed an enormous collection of paper – ranging in scale from postcards to murals – drawn, written, wrinkled and saturated with ink. Some are individual pieces unto themselves, some are pages for hand-bound books and zines, and some are material for dense installation-environments tailored to the architecture of the rooms they occupy.

Almost all my work is in greyscale. I’ve found that within the limits of ink, graphite, paper, light, and my own body, an inexhaustible variety of thinking and expression is possible. This is especially so given that my discipline is comprised of drawing and creative writing.

Though the content of my artwork ranges from the biological to the magical, there is a persistent focus on the relationship between culture and nature, human and non-human animals, deep time and the present. The animals I contemplate most are the species that never existed, don’t exist anymore, and that are threatened with extinction. For example, I love dinosaurs because they are completely real and completely imaginary – they are monsters for real. This tension between what is real and imaginary, what once existed and no longer exists, is the uniting principle in all my work.

While gravely concerned with the notion of extinction, I continue to defend playfulness, the suspension of disbelief, and raw imagination. I hope to effect a discomfort with anthropocentric views of human supremacy. Just as the fairy-tales have often served a cautionary function, my drawings of monsters and haunted places are situated in the inevitably lonesome future that awaits our species if we carry on with fundamentalism, war, and ecocide.