Who is Jeannie Baker?
Jeannie Baker is an English-born Australian author and artist known for picture books made from detailed collages of natural materials. Her books include Mirror, Window and Where the Forest Meets the Sea.
Baker was born in England in 1950 and moved to Australia in the 1970s. Her collages use real materials such as sand, leaves, bark, fabric and paint to build richly textured scenes.
Where the Forest Meets the Sea, published in 1987, shows a boy visiting the Daintree rainforest with his father and imagining its past and future.
Mirror and Window
Window, published in 1991, is a wordless book showing the view from a boy's window changing over 20 years as bushland becomes a city.
Mirror, published in 2010, compares the daily lives of two boys, one in Sydney and one in Morocco, with the pages designed to be read side by side.
Her books encourage readers to think about the environment, the effects of development and the connections between cultures. Many are used in schools to start discussions about change over time and sustainability.
Her original collages have been exhibited in galleries in Australia and overseas, and she has won Children's Book Council of Australia awards. Other titles include Belonging, a companion to Window, and Circle, about migratory birds called bar-tailed godwits.
Did You Know?
Baker spends years creating the collages for a single book.