Part of an outdoor fresque by Olivia.


as part of the reason why she chose to move away from classical music. “You have the orchestra sitting on a stage and everyone is in reverential silence as the conductor taps their baton. I found I had to step away from it because it came to terrify me in the end. It was just too formal. I’ve moved more and more into a position where I’ve come to appreciate and admire folk and traditional music, the type of informal music which spans and crosses boundaries yet which still speaks of politics, stories and resistance. I think for me, my interest in the visual arts has followed a similar course.”


This leads Olivia to reflect upon what she feels the role of artist can be, saying: “The job of the artist is also expression, not necessarily just cataloguing factual detail, but communicating feelings too. Some artists would say it’s not our business at all to be accurately recording facts. Since the invention of photography, as the impressionists showed so well, artists were freed to go and interpret things in the ways they wished and that contained meaning for them.” A natural progression is thinking about what makes art connect. Olivia says: “I’m aware that for many people, the mark of a good painting or drawing is the level


Autumn-Winter 2025


of realistic representation and people’s understanding can often be quite literal.” But for Olivia, she states her aim is to make what she terms informed errors. “I research as well as I can and then I interpret them with some elements of artistic license.”


In a world that seems increasingly split, that artistic license isn’t always easy to find or achieve. “Over the last, however, many months and years, I’ve found it really hard to take hope and motivation from anything that I see going on in the world around me. I’m finding my little, tiny bit of hope and pleasure in looking at birds. I’m just amazed by and marvel at how and why they do what they do. There’s an intense, inbuilt sense of migration, navigation and this energy for building their nests and feeding their young. I know that’s just nature, but when you look at it in detail, it’s just so beautiful and intricate and amazing.” That innate energy and progression and the sense of awe that accompanies it is present through Clever Crow, and the skilful way in which the book uncovers the creative and clever world of the bird is reflected in its mixed- media construction. Recognition of that natural wonder was accompanied by philosophical considerations of our


species relationship to the world that we exist in. “We’ve created a disconnect with the environment and the landscape around us. This is sometimes reflected in the way the countryside is shown and viewed in books and particularly so in children’s books. Maybe that’s to make it more palatable for us as adults to hide our own complicity in the disconnect that we are a part of.”


Olivia modestly describes the techniques


in Clever Crow as “just being collage”, but this does a disservice to much of the research, work and experimentation with which they’ve been constructed using cataloguing entries, excerpts of dictionaries and more.


Keen to explore what the future might hold for Olivia; I ask her if there are writers who she’d most like to collaborate with. Pondering, Olivia pauses and describes how she would love to work with Arundhati Roy, George Monbiot or Peter Frankipan. And with more fictional writing, with people like Nikita Gill, Max Porter, Mohammed Al Kurd and Moshe Babatullah. What are the qualities which in Olivia’s mind make a text that is rich for illustrating? “It is probably quite spare and has a figurative quality allowing the illustrations to convey different levels of meaning, understanding and experience.” PEN&INC


PEN&INC. 11


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