The work of Magda Chmielowska, Polish illustrator, moves across character design, animation, visual identity and editorial. Her visual language is immediately recognisable: characters with soft, rounded forms, a palette that shifts between dusty pink, grey and coral, coarse-grain textures that recall risograph printing. The shapes are gentle and the colours soft — but don’t be fooled. Beneath the reassuring surface, Chmielowska is often speaking about the real world: its inequalities, its injustices, its quiet sadnesses. A family that isn’t smiling. A bored bear scrolling Vinted. A laptop on fire next to the caption “Think about all the fast fashion you consumed throughout your short life.” The critique is there, but it doesn’t shout — it arrives sideways, with the same calm a cartoon character uses to tell you something brutal.

One of her most personal projects is When I See Flashing Snakes, a risograph-printed illustrated book from 2022, made during the heaviest years of her generalised anxiety: a visual diary of epilepsy, auditory and visual hallucinations, fears kept to herself. A work that makes clear her practice is never straightforward illustration — play, in her work, is a tool, not an end.