Jamie Shovlin (born 1978) is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. He is an artist whose work combines extraordinary facility as a draughtsman, printmaker, painter and writer with conceptual complexity and playfulness. His painstakingly researched and executed works merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Through his projects Shovlin questions how information becomes authoritative and explores the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it.

Shovlin is perhaps best known for a series of ambitious projects, including 'Naomi V. Jelish' (2001-2004) and 'Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81' (2003-6), in which the artist constructed extensive and seemingly real archives, which were then revealed to be elaborate fictions. The 'Jelish' archive consists of drawings, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera relating to a 13-year old prodigy who had disappeared with her family in mysterious circumstances, along with notes and inventories made by John Ivesmail, a ‘retired science teacher at Naomi's school [who had] unearthed a collection of the teenager's remarkable drawings’ (both Naomi V Jelish and John Ivesmail are anagrams). A second archive, ‘curated by Jamie Shovlin’ and purporting to document the activities of a German ‘experimental noise band’ from the 1970s, 'Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-1981' (2003-2006) contained cassette covers and posters apparently made by the band's supporters, fan reminiscences, a filmed interview with one of the band members, and even short samples of Lustfaust's music. When these works were shown at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Freight & Volume in New York and in Beck's Futures at the ICA, Shovlin was hailed as an art-world hoaxer par excellence, a reading of the work which perhaps foregrounds the extraordinary technical facility involved in producing the work but which sidelines the seriousness of his undertaking; both archives in fact represent a profound meditation on truth and doubt, and the subjectivity of interpretation. While the Lustfaust archive is more playful the Jelish material is darkly poetic and evocative, heralding a major theme which runs through all Shovlin's recent work; loss - in particular of innocence - and the unreliability of memory. In Shovlin's world the past is retrievable only as a form of simulacra, flawed and inherently doubtful.

Shovlin's 'Fontana Modern Masters' project (2003-2005) extended the artist's interest in exploring the fallibility of classification systems, exploring an absurdist premise: that intellectual achievement can be ranked or scored according to a points system. Fascinated by the ambition and appearance of Fontana's series of books, 'Modern Masters' (which set out to examine the thinkers "who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age"), Shovlin set about constructing a system – set out in the 'Fontana Colour Chart' (2003-2005) – which would allow him to "accurately" produce the covers of the books which Fontana had announced it was to publish but which, for whatever reason, had never appeared. Thus the existing books were analysed, and the colours used in the cover designs were assigned values derived from the percentage of space they occupied, the percentages being taken from the intellectual 'score' of each 'Modern Master' (a total arrived at by a series of seemingly arbitrary criteria). Working from the covers of the existing books Shovlin was therefore able to extrapolate the appearance of non-existent books about such heavyweights as Adorno and Lacan. Painted in watercolour, the archetypal medium of the amateur, the drips and runs of paint that grace these new cover designs return us to an awareness of the flawed nature of Shovlin's proposal.

For his exhibition at Tate Britain, 'In Search of Perfect Harmony' (2003-2006), Shovlin created work which used the conventions of museological display and wildlife documentaries. Using drawings, collage, text, sound recordings and projections, the installation juxtaposed his mother's subjective view of the wildlife in her suburban garden with the scientific rigour of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, as set out in 'The Origin of Species' (1859). These concerns were more comprehensively explored and set within a wider context of knowledge – suggested by an installation of OS 'Landranger' maps sourced on eBay - in the large-scale touring exhibition 'Aggregate' (2003-2007). These exhibitions suggested that scientific enquiry and speculation presents a form of flawed idealism. It purports to render the world knowable. Yet in the gaps between biology, anthropology and taxonomy Shovlin evokes art and poetry; Darwin's theories explain the motivation for a Sparrowhawk attack in his mother's garden (caught on video), but not the metaphorical implications of such an event.

Shovlin's eagerly anticipated new work, 'A Dream Deferred', which will be shown at Haunch of Venison London in July 2007, is a subjective exploration of American history, politics and culture, taking as a framework his parents' record collections; the US-dominated soundtrack of his early life. The project includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculpture, as well as filmed interviews with his parents. A series of new large-scale paintings appropriate imagery from the covers of records by Bob Seeger, Hall & Oates and The Eagles but are painted using techniques associated with modern American masters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella. Taking these as his starting point Shovlin creates a complex web of allusion and association, mixing family history and autobiography with references to the 1968 Olympics (held in Mexico City and remembered for the notorious Black Panther salutes given on the medal podium by John Carlos and Tommie Smith), Woodstock, Sharon Tate and Charles Manson, Abbie Hoffman and Ted Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber), and drawing on a personal art history dominated by Robert Gober, Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Nauman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Eggleston and Ed Ruscha. 'A Dream Deferred' presents a narrative of hope and disillusion. It represents a distanced view of America, filtered through music, art, movies and the arbitrary structures of the internet. Shovlin's title points to the ways in which the idealism of the 1960s (when his parents met) has been alternately compromised, delayed and abandoned; it suggests that the 'American Dream' has soured and given ground to darker forces.