Victo Ngai

Victo Ngai is an illustrator from Hong Kong, currently residing in New York, having studied at Rhode Island School of Design, New York. Her work looks like a wood block print, or a Hokusai painting, but it is actually all done digitally. She seems to be able to translate everything into her own visual language, even when the material she has to illustrate can be quite dry, such as in the financial editorials of Plansponsor magazine. She has worked with Chris Buzelli and his wife Soojin, who is an art director, and has had a good experience with this. I love her use of colour, and her ability to tell a story in such an original way.

Etching

I decided to do a collection of etchings for my major project, and this etching of african wild dogs was the starting point. I also did an etching of the paper litho work below that. I am in the middle of another two, but have not been able to finish this proposal. I may still be able to work on it for the final show.

I was interested in the work of Luo Tao, an illustration graduate of Glasgow School of Art, whose etching work I saw a couple of years ago at the D&AD exhibition and is shown above.

Manchester Museum Entomology Department.

Since a large part of the events in the book I am illustrating, Zookeeper's Wife, hinges on an insect collection, which is still intact today, according to the book in the Warsaw Historical Museum, of one Szymon Tenenbaum, which was moved into the Warsaw Zoo for safekeeping when he was transported to the Warsaw Ghetto. The private passion of the Nazi officer in charge for all things entomological allowed Jan Zabinski to smuggle people out to the safety of the zoo.

Thanks to Eleanor putting me in touch with the Museum, who kindly allowed me to spend time there drawing their magnificent collection. I could have spent hours there, and it did take quite a long time to draw the insects. I was fascinated with the pinning of the insects, which when viewed from a certain angle looked architectural, like a city of insects.

Giorgio de Chirico

I have been looking at de Chirico's work and how he manipulates space, by using different elements to break up the composition. I made this study of his work so that I could imagine new areas of space within the pictorial frame. The book I am illustrating describes such spaces as the arena wherein the outside facade and the interior behind-the-scenes life takes place.

Kate Grenyer

Kate Grenyer's practice centres around the effect of fabricated environments on human interaction with the world - in particular between humans, technology and nature. She makes films and constructs installations, however her most recent work has focussed on drawing as a means of communicating situations and ideas. Her most recent work invokes the idea of lossand disasters whilst still using the same visual language developed in earlier work.

Noelker zoo photos

The Warsaw zoo was one of the first to have a an environment that imitated natural habitats for it's animals. Charles Noelker's photographs challenge the way we see animals as exotic, by imagining them in different backdrops, by painting murals mimicking their natural environment, or a historic cultural association, such as the hippo in an Egyptian setting as above. The idea of people having to hide in what was once one of these enclosures, as was the case in The Zookeeper's Wife, questions what we think about humans and animals, and also what happens to animals in captivity during a war.

Betsy Dadd

When I was in Berlin, Evelyne Laube of Its Raining Elephants told me about Betsy Dadd's work. Her painterly mono-print images of animals and people have inspired me for this project.

Natasha Kissell

In the story I am illustrating, "The Zookeeper"s Wife" by Diane Ackerman, the house that Antonina and Jan Zabinski occupy is a 1930's stucco and brick villa in the International Style. This type of architecture was considered degenerate by Hitler's nazi regime, and was in stark contrast to the traditional Polish style of architecture in Warsaw. The house managed to survive the war and still stands to this day.

Natasha Kissell is influenced by the modern architecture of her childhood in Johannesburg. Her magical realism of her paintings are inspired by Caspar David Friedrich and Peter Doig amongst others.

Grycja Erde

Grycja Erde works in etching, oil and collage. She studied architecture and space design in the Ukraine. In researching for the Zookeeper, I found that the sense of an authoritarian and dehumanising regime seemed evident in her work. It first caught my eye when I was researching for my dissertation on Paula Rego, so when I came to my major project on Zookeeper's Wife, I returned to her work.

I think for this project, my first inclination was to look for space that was "made strange" in some way, and I think Grycja Erde's work does this, and helps me for ideas. The way in which the Zookeeper's house was used to hide people, and yet appear normal at the same time, and living in a strange manner really, conducting a charade as a means of survival, and also as a means to save others. The addition of animals in the household, and also it's status as a zoo further added to the surrealism.