Edel Fernandez Vanaclocha
Within my focus on children’s picturebooks, I explore personal development and growth topics. In "Carrot and Leaf" I look at perseverance and resilience, drawing from my experience as an outsider and insider in a country that wants to disengage from the EU. Using my work as a channel to teach a younger audience about the experience of feeling like not belonging to neither place. Aiming to express and share how that difference in perspective is what makes everyone themselves and how it should be celebrated.
My work takes on an educational dimension through designing and facilitating workshops, creating safe spaces for children and adults alike to explore their creativity though illustration. Because I believe that picturebooks aren’t simply entertainment, I try to find ways to use my skills as an animator and workshop facilitator to take the content of my work to engage with the audience in active ways. During these testing times, I designed a collaborative workshop with the aim of supporting mental wellbeing in which the participants were asked to create a picturebook. Sharing some of my favourite illustration techniques in video and text format, supported with a physical material kit.
