ART FEATURED IN
THE SEVEN SKINS OF ESTHER WILDING
Cover artist
Fumi Nakamura
Fumi Nakamura is a New York City based street artist, illustrator and designer. Originally from Shimizu, Japan, her family moved to California when she was 12. Her intense and sometimes eerie graphite and coloured pencil artworks have been featured in exhibitions around the world.
Growing up in Japan around mountains and the ocean, nature heavily influenced what would develop into a Fumi Nakamura’s very distinct style. Human figures, feathered and toothed creatures, skulls, birds and abstractly altered animals with multiple heads or eyes form a mixture of natural and imaginary elements which make her sometimes grim looking art visually intriguing. Besides the obvious naturalistic influence, Nakamura’s work is a reflection of her mental state. Extracting heavy thoughts and emotions into her art is her way of staying mentally balanced. Nakamura holds a BFA of Pictorial Arts degree from San Jose State University.
Cover designer
Hazel Lam
Hazel Lam is an award-winning Senior Book Designer at HarperCollins Australia. She designed both of the covers of Holly’s novels; The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the 2019 Designer’s Choice Cover of the Year at the Australian Book Designers Association awards.
Hazel entered the publishing industry in 2013: her experience spreads across fiction, non-fiction, illustrated books, YA, children’s fiction and picture books. In 2020, she became the first book designer to be win the Rising Star Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards. Hazel has worked in motion graphics, broadcast design, magazine publishing and advertising for various clients in both Sydney and London. She loves to obsessively illustrate patterns, eat delicious foods and tell cheese jokes to anyone who will listen.
Internal pages art
Edith Rewa
Edith Rewa Barrett is an Australian based Illustrator and Textile Designer. She is the illustrator of all artworks featured in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and is the illustrator of the internal artworks featured in The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Edith splits her time between client commissions (in publishing, stationery, fashion and design), exhibition work and her own label, Edith Rewa.
Edith studied Bachelor of Arts (Textile Design) (screen-printing major) at RMIT, Melbourne with a brief sojourn to the Estonian Academy of the Arts. A job at a commercial print design studio took her to Sydney for 3 years before she moved to the Blue Mountains
to work full time on her label with collections ‘’Fossick’’ and ''Field Trip''. Edith is now based in Brisbane, QLD and working on a body of work featuring the Wallum Heathland plants of SEQld.
Edith drawing the shell illustrations for The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Credit: Nat McComas.
Gold-mouth conniwink by Edith Rewa
The first page of Esther Wilding, featuring Edith Rewa’s gold-mouth conniwink illustration.
Artists and artwork featured in the story of Esther Wilding
John Bauer
John Albert Bauer (4 June 1882 – 20 November 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator. His work is concerned with landscape and mythology, but he also composed portraits. He is best known for his illustrations of early editions of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), an anthology of Swedish folklore and fairy tales, in which John illustrated three pieces for Helena Nyblom’s Agneta and the Sea King (pictured far left). John Bauer also illustrated Helena Nyblom’s Svanhamnen (pictured left).
When Bauer was 36, he drowned, together with his wife, artist Ester Ellqvist, and their son Bengt, in a shipwreck on Lake Vättern in southern Sweden.
Illustration from Helena Nyblom’s Agneta and the Sea King – John Bauer, 1910. Image courtesy of Uppsala Auktionskammare.
Illustration from Helena Nyblom’s Svanhamnen – John Bauer.
Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is one of Sweden’s most esteemed artists.
Graduating with honours in 1887 from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, af Klint was recognised as a talented naturalistic painter but in 1906 chose to pursue a radically different path as an artist – one that was deeply engaged with spiritualism, with new developments in science and with the natural world.
Today she is celebrated all over the world.
Holly Ringland at the Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2019.
Hans Pauli Olsen
Hans Pauli Olsen is a Faroese sculptor currently living in Denmark, and held in high regard. He is one of the most popular artists in the Faroes. His work is found not only in art galleries but also in many towns in the Faroes, especially in the Faroese capital Tórshavn.
Charles Folkard
Charles James Folkard was a British book illustrator and comic artist.
He was the illustrator of Jolly Calle & Other Swedish Fairy Tales, Helena Nyblom’s fairytale anthology, featuring All the Wild Waves of the Sea (pictured right).
He is best remembered as the creator of 'Teddy Tail' (1915-1974), one of the earliest and longest-running British newspaper comics.
Courtesy of the estate of Charles Folkard.
Eivør
Eivør Pálsdóttir, known as Eivør, is a beloved Faroese singer-songwriter and actress. Born and raised in Syðrugøta, she had her first televised performance at the age of thirteen. Over the course of her decades-long career, her musical output has spanned a wide range of genres such as folk, art pop, jazz, folk rock, classical and electronica. Her song, Trøllabundin, is an important part of Esther Wilding’s story.
Kanalaritja (shell necklaces)
Click on the image below to learn about kanalartija.
Kanalaritja by Ashlee Murray