Ivona Khmelevskaya

The Polish artist Iwona Chmielewska graduated from the graphics department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She lives and works there today: she teaches a course in the artist’s book. However, when it comes to book art, Chmielewska calls herself self-taught. She created her first books instinctively, “by feel,” constantly experimenting. In this, she was greatly helped by her collaboration with the Polish publishing house Algo, which gave her virtually complete freedom in designing fairy tales for children and poetry collections for adults. “Even then, I intuitively felt the need to create in my illustrations something independent of the author’s narrative: an artist needs to be able to continue telling what is only implied, to allow herself to be drawn into a verbal-visual game, sometimes to look for a solution between the words.”

There is usually very little text in Iwona Chmielewska’s artist’s books, but they are highly expressive, including through their conciseness. “An image can sometimes replace a thousand words. With the help of illustrations, we can touch on things we do not want to describe in words,” says the artist.