Ian C Pool

Biography

Ian C Pool's practice spans photography, painting, ceramics, music and writing, all unified under the project name HolyGreenCow. Working from Brisbane since the mid-1990s, Pool has maintained a multidisciplinary approach that treats visual art, sound and text as interconnected parts of a single mythology.

His visual work draws from the cinematic ambiguity of Tracey Moffatt, the mythic landscapes of Sidney Nolan, and the satirical provocations of Nick Cave and TISM. Filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Bong Joon Ho inform his interest in worlds that sit just adjacent to our own. Pool's background in music—over a decade performing and recording as singer-songwriter—shaped his approach to series-based work, where individual pieces accumulate into larger narratives with the structure of concept albums.

Pool's satirical photography series They Came, created using lo-fi iPhone technology, is held in government collections including Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery and ArtBank. The images depict blurred figures caught mid-flight through ordinary spaces, fleeing unseen threats that speak to collective anxieties around environmental collapse and political instability. The series uses cheap technology deliberately—choosing urgency and accessibility over technical polish.

His painting and ceramic practice extends this visual mythology into physical form, creating handmade creatures, objects and symbols that sit between humour and menace. These pieces feel like artefacts recovered from a slightly altered version of our world—familiar enough to recognize, strange enough to unsettle.

In 2025, Pool began writing his first novel, HolyGreenCow Chronicles. The book expands the visual mythology into prose, exploring the same territory that appears in his artwork: spaces where the absurd becomes profound, the political intertwines with the domestic, and the everyday tips into the mythological.

Based in Brisbane, Pool teaches Visual Art at secondary level while maintaining an active exhibition schedule. His work is held in regional galleries and private collections across Australia. HolyGreenCow is an ongoing act of world-building across mediums and across decades—one story at a time.

Artist Statement

HolyGreenCow is a universe I've been building in fragments for decades. My work, across music, photography, painting, and now prose, circles the idea of the "Witness." I am interested in that quiet, often awkward space where the ordinary suburban tips into something uncanny.

My perspective is shaped by being an outsider at the kitchen table. Born in Australia but adopted by an English family who emigrated in the 1960s, I grew up navigating a landscape that felt both like home and a foreign country. This sense of being "between places" is the heartbeat of my practice. The 70's happened at the right time for me—the music, humour and movies coming out of Australia at that time hit me in my formative years. It made an impact.

There was a long silence in my CV. For over a decade, my creative life went underground while I raised a family, navigated a divorce, and retrained to become a teacher. I don't see those years as a gap. They were a gestation period. They provided the grit, the exhaustion, and the perspective needed to finally move from individual images to a larger story. Now that I am settled teaching Visual Art, I am free to continue my journey.

The figures in my work are often caught mid-gesture, bracing for a change they can't quite see. There is a deliberate humour in these moments, but it isn't there to make light of things. It's a way of staying present when the world feels heavy.

Curriculum Vitae

For complete exhibition history and full CV, download the PDF above or contact directly.