25/05/21
NA Meets: Cecilie Maurud Barstad, author and illustrator
During the first London lockdown in March 2020, the Norwegian author and illustrator Cecilie Maurud Barstad began to notice her neighbours – and draw them.
At home in Highbury Square, the redevelopment of the former Arsenal stadium in North London, Maurud Barstad sat on her balcony, watching the comings and goings in the communal garden (the former football pitch). She began to sketch and create short texts about the figures, imagining stories about what they might be doing, thinking or feeling.
Born in Tonsberg on the Oslo Fjord, Maurud Barstad has lived with her partner Gilles Jourdan in the Highbury development of 650 sustainably-designed flats for the past five years. The couple met in 2002, during a fire drill break from their studies at Central St Martins, and today run a design studio for clients such as Harvey Nichols and UNICEF while raising their young daughter Niki (named after the artist Niki de Saint Phalle).
A year after sharing her lockdown compositions with friends, Maurud Barstad has now brought them together in the book Rear Window. As the limited-edition volume is published, Norwegian Arts spoke to Maurud Barstad about bookbinding, peering into the lives of others and the colour of sunny days.
Read the full interview here