Ian C Pool

Biography

Ian C Pool is a Brisbane artist, writer, musician and Visual Art teacher. HolyGreenCow is the name he has used since the mid-1990s for work across photography, painting, ceramics, music and writing.

Music came first. Pool spent more than a decade performing and recording as a singer-songwriter with Animal Boy and U-then8. That habit of building an album from separate songs carried into the visual work: individual images accumulate into stories rather than standing around looking important on their own.

His photographic series They Came was made with an early iPhone, an overhead projector and a very small special-effects budget. Works from the series are held by Artbank and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. The photographs owe something to Australian storytelling, suburban menace, B-movie effects and a refusal to behave too respectfully.

Painting, drawing and ceramics brought HolyGreenCow into physical form: portraits, religious figures, odd creatures, UFOs and ordinary Australian places with something slightly wrong in the air.

After a long period centred on family and teaching, Pool returned to exhibiting in 2025 with Cats at Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery. Current work includes portrait drawing, studies for a larger Birdsville painting, and the draft novel HolyGreenCow Chronicles. The archive is extensive. The present tense is still underway.

Artist Statement

HolyGreenCow is where my photographs, objects, songs and writing live together. I keep returning to ordinary Australian places when something feels slightly off. Usually there is a joke in it, though not necessarily a reassuring one.

My perspective is shaped by being an outsider at the kitchen table. I was born in Australia and adopted by an English family who emigrated in the 1960s. The place was home, but it also felt slightly foreign. The 1970s arrived at the right time: Australian music, humour and films taught me that discomfort could be funny without becoming harmless.

There was a long silence in my CV. Family, divorce, retraining and teaching took most of the available energy. The work did not disappear, but public exhibition did. I returned to it with more life behind me and less need to sound impressive.

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.