The artist · Tuzla, since 2010

Jasenko
Đorđević

Self-taught. He carves by hand into the graphite core of a pencil — the work that becomes TOLDart.

Statement

In the artist’s words

Ever since I was a child I’ve been drawn to the miniature. With a steady hand, patience, and a good deal of imagination, I began making art from an unlikely object — a pencil.

The pencil has served people and made art for as long as we can remember. I wanted to reverse that order. Here the pencil itself becomes the work: it still leaves a testimony, only now it tells the whole story without writing a word or drawing a line. With very simple tools I carve detailed sculptures from its tip, giving an ordinary, inexpensive object a rarer kind of value.

My sculptures speak, quietly, about life. A pencil has to be both soft and strong — it must take the carving of the smallest detail without breaking. People are shaped the same way, asked to bend and endure, to carry many roles without being broken by them. Through this work I speak against violence, hold to family, carry my country with me, and now and then give new life to a familiar image, like The Creation of Adam.

The path

Self-taught · since 2010

Jasenko Đorđević was born in Tuzla in 1983 and still lives and works there. He had no formal training. In January 2010 he carved his first sculpture into a pencil, and has refined the practice ever since.

His subjects range widely — portraits, animals, landmarks, reworkings of familiar images — but the concerns underneath stay close: he works against violence, holds to family, and carries the place he comes from with him. The scale is small; the intent is not.

The practice

By hand · under magnification

Everything is done by hand. Working under magnification, Đorđević removes graphite from the core of a pencil a fragment at a time, with a scalpel, until a figure remains. There is no machine and little room for error — a single slip can end a piece that took weeks.

What he looks for isn’t accuracy so much as recognition: the point at which a form reads as itself, and a face keeps its expression, at a size where detail should be impossible. The pencil is no longer a tool but the medium.