CHAPTER I: WANDERER OF YAWNDER

“Once, up on the hills over Yawnder,
I was out with Floyd fer a wander,
when there was like something I’d never seen,
not in real life or a dream.” –
 Jiggs

Read more below about Chapter I of the Yawnder series.

And check out Chapter II, Chapter III and Chapter IV.

Since 2008, Jay Dart has been working on a series of drawings about the wanderers of a fictional place known as Yawnder as a way to represent his creative process. Each drawing in this series adds to an evolving narrative about the mystical nature of inspiration, the search for innovative creation, and the dissemination of ideas. Dart is interested in drawing allegories for these themes as well as for the challenges and opportunities that new technology, such as cloud computing, social networking, and the global community of the internet, presents to contemporary creators.

From 2009 to 2012, Jay Dart created a series of drawings with a unified narrative about a place known as Yawnder and exhibited them at smaller venues. In 2012, he completed 20 drawings that were inspired by the initial pieces in order to produce his first bookwork that was self-published under the title, Wanderer of Yawnder

From 2013-2015, Dart exhibited more drawings from this series  at Galerie Youn in Montreal, Line Gallery in North Bay, Station Gallery in Whitby and Wallspace Gallery in Ottawa. Drawings from this era would comprise the next chapter in the series titled Further Over Yawnder. In 2019, Dart self-published Where Yawns Go: Volume 1 which includes all of the drawings from the first book, Wanderer of Yawnder, as chapter one along with a selection of drawings from the Further Over Yawnder series in order to tell the second chapter of the story.

In 2016, Greetings From Yawnder! opened at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery before travelling to the Art Gallery of Sudbury in February 2017. This exhibition featured 70+ drawings from the first two chapters alongside many installation pieces that brought the world of Yawnder to life within the gallery space, The accompanying catalogue for this exhibition, Field Guide to Yawnder, is included in the Art Gallery of Ontario bookstore.