Jasenko Đorđević
“If a miracle brought peace overnight, I wouldn’t look for it in the streets. I would look for a child sitting quietly with a book — unhurried, undisturbed, free to follow their own thoughts. That, to me, is the clearest picture of peace there is. I don’t say this from a distance. I grew up during the war in Bosnia; I was ten years old. Looking back, some of my strongest memories are not of conflict, but of ordinary moments — sitting in a classroom, reading a book, learning about a world beyond the one outside my window. At the time, it felt normal. Today, I understand how precious those moments were. They represented continuity, hope, and the belief that life could be more than the circumstances surrounding us.
A child who is allowed to learn grows into someone who can form their own judgment and is harder to manipulate. It is slow, quiet work, but minds like that are the ground a more peaceful world is built on.
I carved this boy into the graphite core of a pencil — the very first tool we place in a child’s hand to teach them. The instrument of learning, shaped into the reason learning matters.”
Jasenko Đorđević (TOLDart) is a Bosnian artist known for miniature sculptures carved into the graphite core of a pencil. Born in Tuzla in 1983, he is self-taught and has been turning pencils into sculptures since 2010. Since 2021 he has been part of the international project “Small is Beautiful,” shown in Paris, London, New York, Brussels, Milan and Taipei. Since 2013 his work has been part of the permanent collection of the Cumberland Pencil Museum in the UK, and in 2019 he received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His miniatures cover a wide range of subjects, though the themes he is most drawn to are nonviolence and universal human values.
“Reader,” graphite (the core of an HB pencil), hand-carved micro-sculpture, figure approx. 8 mm high, on a graphite core 5 mm in diameter
The small Chinese characters 奮斗 on the base mean “striving”.
I toldart
