Speaker presentation

Stina Wirsén

For as long as I remember, I have been drawing and making up stories. My sister and I loved when our mother read to us, and she in turn loved to read.

I have kept quite a few of my earliest efforts, and in my recent work I see a return to my childhood sketches. Isn’t Teddy and his friend a bit like something a child would draw? In fact, even my Motley characters look a bit like Cephalopods – the toddler’s first representation of a human figure: Large heads, resting directly on a pair of legs, with tiny arms and dots for eyes.

I believe my stories have been greatly influenced by my own childhood, and by the times in which I was a child. But I also have the ambition to bring our own age, the ever-present Now in which we find ourselves, into my work.

No doubt my two decades as an illustrator for Sweden’s largest morning paper has shaped me. Drawing political subjects and author’s portraits, capturing fashion and nightlife on the fly, has been my university.

At present, I have left the world of daily news to devote myself fully to my own projects, but I maintain a vivid interest in contemporary cultural currents and expressions.