Spread from Antje Damm's The Visitor Photo: Antje Damm
Antje Damm Photo: supplied
Remember making dioramas with pen and card in shoeboxes as a child?
As a quick survey of German artist and writer Antje Damm’s instagram will attest, Damm creates a world of hand-cut wonder with tiny dioramas constructed in matchboxes.
It began with architecture and shoeboxes. At home with children after a professional life as an architect, Damm turned her 3D modelling skills to constructing cardboard dioramas to photograph, as illustrations for books she wrote for her four girls.
With many books translated around the world since, and a New York Times/New York Public Libraries Best Illustrated Children's Book award for her most well-known, The Visitor, she has created a unique new career for herself.
Photo: Antje Damm
Damm’s more recent tiny matchbox works were born of having time on her hands during Covid lockdown to indulge her skills. It is something, she says, she now does for fun.
Playful and ingenious in concepts and use of colour, material and line, Damm’s wee combinations of two and three dimensions bridge sophisticated design and childhood imagination.
Antje Damm lighting the diorama for The Visitor Photo: Silja Damm
Like a lighting designer, a key aspect of the work is how it is lit. She’s also enormously playful with her combinations of style and materials, not to mention her writing.
Damm’s concepts often speak to the power through art of being able to make and colour your own private world.
In The Visitor, a woman lives alone in a grey paper dollhouse. An armada of paper planes arrive, announcing the arrival of a young boy, who literally starts turning the world of the dollhouse into colour with his movement.
Spread from Waiting for Goliath Photo: Antje Damm
In the charming Waiting for Goliath, the snail Goliath’s eventual arrival is heralded by the line “he heard a faint noise like a hand sliding slowly across paper”.
As innocent as it is artful, the style of this book is experimental in its play with abstracted landscape and the rough depiction of its cut-out characters.
Photo: Antje Damm
“For me,” Damm tells Culture 101’s Mark Amery, “it’s very important that the children who see the pictures don’t say, ‘Oh, it's very perfect, that’s very well done’.
“I think it's very important that they think ‘Oh, I can do it on my own.’ I do many workshops where we build these cardboard houses.”
One of the other key motivations for Damm when she started making books for her daughters was also to write books that aren’t afraid to ask small children the big life and death questions. Her first book Ask Me has since been updated with more questions. She treats the power of childhood solutions seriously, figuring adults often don’t have the answers.
The Visitor and Waiting for Goliath have both been translated into English and published in Aotearoa New Zealand by Gecko Press.
Antje Damm is coming to Aotearoa New Zealand this month as part of the Gecko Press coordinated Picture Me, a two week festival running in Pōneke Wellington and Ōtautahi Christchurch from 10 to 28 September.
Antje Damm books with Gecko Press Photo: Gecko Press
This celebration of illustration for children sees three artists travel here from France, Germany and Poland, joining local illustrators in workshops, talks, a live mural painting and an exhibition at Te Auaha in Pōneke.
