Dates of event :
from: 8. 9. 2017
to: 29. 10. 2017
Venue :
Slovenské národné múzeum, Vajanského nábrežie 2
Laura Carlin graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2004. Besides book illustration, she also designs covers for several leading periodicals such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. She also makes ceramic art and lives and works in London.
Technical skill and a sense of humor are the features of her art; art that is sensitive, pondering and beautiful. Humor is important in her works to give them a look from the distance because, as she puts it, things that are too serious may discourage the readers. In her work, she first ponders about the book as a whole and the ideas hidden in it. She likes illustrating books where the text is visually rich. Yet in those instances, she has to make sure not to repeat the words with her illustrations. For that reason she has to think about ideas, themes and plots hidden within the stories that allow her to express them in a different, text-enriching way. Laura’s ability to pass on a wealth of emotions through the minutest detail is well-thought and worked-through and combines children’s naivety with certain sentimentality, characteristic of her works that has brought her to her distinct artistic expression. Her illustrations seek to encourage children to read, draw and create. She uses color pencils, water colors and acrylic colors.
Laura Carlin won several awards for her works including the Honorable Mention at the BolognaRagazzi competition, the Quentin Blake award and the D&AD Pencil award. She won the 2015 Grand Prix BIB for the books A World of Your Own and The Iron Man. As the International Jury BIB 2015 put it, “The Iron Man and The World of Your Own are two different stories, both created by a self-confident and very skilled personal visual language with use of diverse media”, in which Laura Carlin moves among various moods with ease and much caution at the same time, demonstrating her sensitivity and sense of humor. The tiniest pictures along with double spread illustrations were made conscientiously and with a perfect timing of the pages. Innovative visual elements are not used arbitrarily or in a disturbing way. They always have their functional meaning. These books, with their sense of detail and concurrently clear vision of the whole, have become a brilliant example of the technique-medium dialogue with an extensive comparative scale of criteria.
Mgr. Viera Anoškinová, Head of BIB Secretariat
