Intelligent Sentient?

By Luke Ramsey. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 64 pages, Colour, 2015. 

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.

“Looking closely at one of Luke Ramsey's images, one sees the big bold shapes dissolve into a chaos of squiggles only to find new patterns emerging. Somehow he manages to distill the sense of order and chaos found in nature into his work.” —Squidface and the Meddler on Luke Ramsey