Olivia Boutrou

Olivia is an illustrator and designer with a reputation for making detailed and complex ideas accessible through illustrative storytelling. Her work can be seen across a variety of landscapes from museums to magazines and cafes, and right through to charities and trusts.

Her work has been exhibited in its own right in Europe, and you can see Olivia’s inimitable style here in the UK in her latest work at the Biggin Hill Memorial Museum.

Olivia’s style runs through all of her work regardless of the subject matter, and remains playful, colourful and lively whilst providing the audience with a sense of place. 

The first collection commissioned for Pattern & Picture takes inspiration from her recent experience in Sri Lanka, as she describes here:

“From my experience being born and raised in a city, my relationship to nature has always been limited to having plants in a pot on the window sill and a cat on the sofa. With my first step onto Sri Lankan soil, I discovered an opposite world, where humans were living alongside and within magnificent, living and flourishing nature; an incredible biodiversity that even my imagination of what paradise might resemble couldn’t match. Wild elephants crossing the road, birds signing everywhere, groups of monkeys playing at my feet, all sorts of flora and fauna everywhere, living around me. 

For this artwork I took inspiration from this wonderful experience and from a series of Sri Lankan folk tales. I translated the feeling of nature surrounding and dominating people by showing most of the characters much smaller than the flora and fauna, giving nature its importance back.”

Find out more about Olivia at www.oliviaboutrou.com