Dominika Czerniak-Chojnacka | Poland
“The Gravestone” is a picturebook about grief. The main character is an artist, who takes on the burden of designing a gravestone for his late mother, as he does not want an ‘ordinary one’.
He is working on it and thinking about it all the time, as it frequently happens in an artistic process. The key to that simple story is a huge rock, which appears on each page, made of solid tint, the so–called ‘terrazzo’. At the beginning he is overwhelmed by its enormity, but eventually, after a dozen or so pages, it begins to shrink — as much as it finally reaches the size of a grain of sand. In spite of appearances it is not only a story of a difficult and exhausting artistic process, but above all a story of struggling with grief. Putting up a gravestone is somehow healing for the grieving person — it is a kind of closure. The main character, standing in the graveyard looking at the gravestone he had designed, is finally smiling.
Education:
University of Arts in Poznan
graphic design
Graduation: 2014
Published titles: 2