Ian C Pool

HolyGreenCow
Brisbane, Australia
holygreencow@gmail.com · @holygreencow_ian_pool
www.holygreencow.com
Brisbane-based multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator working across photography, painting, ceramics, music and prose. Practice spans three decades under the evolving banner of HolyGreenCow, exploring themes of Australian Gothic, suburban anxiety and the intersection of the domestic and the mythological. Work held in public collections including ArtBank and regional galleries across Australia.

Education

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Awards, Grants & Recognition

Public Collections

Artistic Practice

Photography

Major series include They Came (2009–2012), austrALIENation (2011), The Greatest Story Ever Told 2 (2012), Cataclysm, and Dreams of an Ordinary Man. Work characterized by lo-fi iPhone technology, constructed narratives, and exploration of suburban anxiety and environmental collapse.

Painting & Ceramics

Handmade creatures, objects and symbols extending visual mythology into physical form. Work sits between humour and menace, creating artefacts from a slightly altered version of our world.

Music

Released albums under Animal Boy (Walking Stick, 1995; Attack of the Stickmen, 1996) and U-then8 (U-then8, 2000; Liar A, 2002). Full catalogue available on Spotify.

Writing

Currently drafting debut novel HolyGreenCow Chronicles (2025), expanding the visual mythology into prose. Explores territory where the absurd becomes profound and the political intertwines with the domestic and mythic.

Professional Experience

Artist Statement

HolyGreenCow is an ongoing act of world-building across mediums and decades. The work moves between images, objects and text, circling questions of how the ordinary becomes uncanny, how pressure on landscape and body shifts them out of place. Figures are caught mid-gesture—running, hiding, bracing for what may or may not arrive. The threat sits just outside the frame. Humour is deliberate but not there to cancel anxiety; it's a way of staying with it.