3 Practitioners

Laura Carlin

Laura Carlin tackles dark and difficult subjects within her editorial work, using illustration as a medium to reflect the article in a sensitive way compared to what photography could offer. Her childrens books celebrate childrens imagination and individuality by encouraging them to create how they want to rather than patronisingly teaching them to draw. She says she takes inspiration from children,  something I definitely want to celebrate in my own work and tap into a childlike naivety and wonder as Laura manages to do so successfully. Laura Carlin's ceramic work is really special and I love how she manages to basically pull her approach to a flat piece of paper illustration straight onto the medium of ceramics, for example her illustrated ceramic tiles, as well as creating more 3D pieces which still retain that beautiful considered naivety. Her work is a celebration of all things wonky and wonderful, an excitement about the world around her and how to translate that into hand-made imagery.




Charlotte Ager

Charlotte Ager captures the world around her in a beautiful personal way, producing emotive drawings and paintings which draw from personal experiences, words and writings and visual motifs.
Her animation work is done frame by frame rather than digitally and so shares the same precious analogue quality that her illustration work has. Collaborating with other illustrators she has produced animation work which combines 3D cut outs and models with hand drawn frames. Her reportage work sees her go on residencies to capture the feeling of certain cities and places with a gorgeous vagueness, she captures a feeling rather than a completely accurate visual portrayal. Her illustration has taken form in murals, book covers, spot illustrations in magazines and menus and on pop up posters.




Charlotte Mei

I love the loose painterly confident visuals of Charlotte Mei's work and how she retains this beautiful handmade quality into various applied areas. Bold shapes and colours work perfectly within the context of album artwork/apparel. Theres something really charming about the flatness (?) in her work, its naive and playful and this is never lost in the process of creating goods or applications of her illustration. Its interesting to see interdisciplinary approaches to campaigns within fashion, where her illustrations have been used in conjunction with photography and styling for a Smythson campaign, as well as physical art being used within the stores.  She also produces tactile ceramic work which keeps the painterly quality and wonky shapes, and creates accessible art through products like zines.