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Jim Holyoak
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
In my drawings I have been trying to explore and describe the limbos between fantasy, perception, dreams, memory, and imagination. I have steadily created and collected a mountain of paper - garbage and photocopies, drawings of distorted people, places and animals, real and imaginary, covered in stains, wrinkles and writing. The resultant books and installations are created though a combination of careful editing and intuitive connections. These pages, intimate and overwhelmingly physical, range in scale from business cards to murals. They are both individual pieces unto themselves and material for artist books, zines, and dense installation environments.
My approach is a blend of intention and chance that employs life drawing, drawing from found sources, as well as imagination and memory. I vary my techniques frequently while maintaining monochromatic constraints.
There is no clear seam where the creative process begins or ends. Though the content of my art varies enormously, much of it has been a depiction of my romance with the temperate British Columbian rainforests I grew up around - dense, green, and crawling with banana slugs. I love dinosaurs because they are completely real and imaginary - they are monsters for real. I make a defense of suspended disbelief, playfulness, and unleashed, raw imagination.
Other themes in my work emerge from the blending of politics with the hyper-personal. My writing (often incorporated with the drawing) is particularly rife with sexual awkwardness, spiritual uncertainty, and an attention to human relationships with environments and Mother Nature.
I am particularly interested in farm animals, extinct animals, endangered animals, primates, insects, amphibians, and bizarre animals. My work draws parallels between species, and questions the value of our supposed differences. I want to inspire a discomfort with anthropocentric views of ‘god-given’ superiority, and encourage viewers to imagine the inevitably lonesome future that awaits our species with if we carry on with fundamentalism, war, and ecocide.