Intelligent Sentient?

Delicate, complex drawings tell of a science-fiction world

Intelligent Sentient? feels like an artifact from another time—a lost feature in OMNI magazine or the album booklet for a late-1970s Hawkwind record or perhaps a print version of Koyaanisqatsi. Beautiful, detailed filigreed drawings fold in on themselves and blossom out at the reader as time speeds up and contracts. A loose story is told that involves a society of giant people, strange art, and inexplicable scientific experiments utilizing nonexistent technology. Factories and tree houses teem with life, and the city nestles up against a landscape filled with dinosaurs, apes, and dragonflies living peacefully side by side.
Intelligent Sentient? is a series of images that are tied together not in narrative but in a progressing theme, the takeaway being that everything is connected. The drawings contain the fine detail of a watchmaker and the visual scope of a social reform muralist. This book is meant to be read forward and backward and returned to and treated like a mystical text.

Luke Ramsey cofounded the Islands Fold residency, exhibits internationally, and works as a freelance illustrator for clients such as The New York Times. His practice includes collaboration, design, public art projects, and detailed freehand drawing. Ramsey’s collaborative mural with Josh Holinaty won an award of excellence from the city of Edmonton and a National Urban Design Medal from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. He lives on Pender Island, British Columbia.