Jack Laurian Pascoe

Welcome to my website; my friends call me Jaqi, Jaq, Jack – or if they’re mad at me, Jacqueline.

You may have seen me onstage at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre or the Sydney Opera House a long time ago, as Jacqueline Pascoe, or more recently under various monikers in the underground clubs of Sydney and Berlin. Perhaps you’ve read my writing in The Australian, Dance Australia, Tanz Europe or a range of other publications, from peer-reviewed journal Hecate to Art Gallery of NSW magazine Look, under one or other version of my name.

There is no single word for what I do, so I invented one. I’m a polykallitect – a multidisciplinary artist/philosopher. I began my working life as a dancer with the Australian Ballet, got a degree in English and philosophy in my thirties, learned to sing and then wrote and performed cabaret shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Berlin. I wrestled for several years with a monstrously ambitious novel. I sang with rock bands, and in the early 2000s created a series of performance art pieces at clubs and warehouse parties around inner Sydney. I began working as an artists’ model around then too, finding a perennially engaging thread to my creative practice that would endure to the present and beyond. After a decade immersed in the world of fine arts – and notwithstanding my misgivings about taking up another art form – I began to sculpt. I still take occasional commissions, and my sculpture Fireflier is in the collection of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.

All through this I continued the research practice I’d acquired at university, following lines of inquiry into questions of power, gender, sex, politics and religion. I tried to weave all my thoughts into a single storyline, a big, pyrotechnical satire about the end of the world, but I couldn’t pull it together fast enough; reality was overtaking fiction. I’d long toyed with the idea of a YouTube channel, but it was years before everything came together to create Philosophilia.

These days I spend a lot of time on the Central Coast, where my partner lives, not far from my sister. I still dance, though not ballet. I still sing, though rarely. I am known to create occasional moments of impromptu public theatre that amount to performance art. My home, Redfern Art Asylum, is an artwork in itself, a sanctuary and a workspace – and now the backdrop for Philosophilia videos.