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When people are generous enough to share their knowledge with you, it’s up to you to interpret it and distil it down accurately.
Making space for meaning
Olivia Lomenech Gill won this year’s Carnegie Medal for Illustration with Clever Crow. Here she talks to Jake Hope on how growing up with an avid interest in animals, gardening, self-sufficiency and art influenced her work.
AS a child, her mother used to take her by train to London to visit the Royal Academy summer exhibitions. Olivia remembers seeing works by Henry Moore, Dali and Goya and becoming interested in lithographs and other artistic media and techniques. “It was a real variety, that’s what was important,” she says. “It was probably how I learned and discovered about the history of art, by looking at books and being inspired. Having books given to you sparks a sense of intrigue! I found out about the impressionists, then about the cubists and then about many other different art movements and I’d have a go at all of them. It was probably an important part in developing my style.” Sculptor Elizabeth Frink was another early art interest, with Olivia saying: “I don’t know why her work particularly appealed. There was a poster in the downstairs toilet of a friend’s house promoting an exhibition of her work. It spurred me on to draw a chalk horse on a blackboard that was given to me by my father when I was around six,” Olivia would find herself returning to Elizabeth Frink’s work in her career as an illustrator when working on the illustrations for Muck and Magic, written by Michael Morpurgo. “It felt a serendipitous magic cycle coming back to this after 30 to 35 years. It was really important to me to try to be true to her work in the book, especially as I feel she is not as well recognised as she should be when compared with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth who have become almost household names. Elizabeth Frink seems to have remained more under the radar.”
Autumn-Winter 2025
Art classes in school gave the opportunity for Olivia to further develop her craft. She says: “I would practice sketching, it might just be drawing a hand, but studying hands is really important. I’d carry a sketchbook wherever I went and would pore over books and visit exhibitions.” At this point, Olivia became fascinated by printmaking but wouldn’t get to try her hand at this until later. Although she doesn’t consider herself a landscape artist, Olivia describes herself as being, “immersed in surroundings where I’ve chosen to be very rural and far from any human habitation”. A sense of the wild runs through much of her work. Narrative has also played a formative role in Olivia’s work, whether that’s in her paintings, in her illustrations or in the stage design work she has done for the theatre. “As an artist I was always interested in narrative, or at least in making artwork which is narrative based.”
It was this which led Olivia into the illustration world following a chance encounter with the author Michael Morpurgo who invited her to respond to the text for Where my Wellies Take Me. The manuscript included poems, which Olivia visualised and depicted as a child’s journal, revealing: “I loved illustrating the poetry in the book. It really took me to different places. You want each subject to be rendered properly and to do them justice. There was a lot of time spent trying to get to know and research each of these individual components. When people are generous enough to share their knowledge with you, it’s up to you to interpret it and distil it down accurately.” Olivia felt massively honoured being shortlisted for
PEN&INC. 9
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