Instagram: @celiadeserrastudio
It’s the late 1970s, I recall my father pointing out hidden wayside flowers in the Kent country lanes where we lived. Tiny speedwell blues and bird’s-foot trefoil, scrambling wild strawberries.. I was entranced. Tree climbing and tree-house building followed, forming part of the backbone of my early life. My sketchbooks teemed with drawings of plants and animals, and people, if they sat still long enough. Later, in the 80s, stories of acid rain destroying forests alarmed me, and the early indicators of global warming, I remember a particularly disturbing drawing I made of a grotesque dissolving tree throwing its arms into the sky in distress. These trees were characters I thought, emblematic of the natural world at large, beautiful, wild, essential and under threat.
Now, as we head into the 2020s, I’m still at it, roaming around woodlands and moorland in a sort of desperate, deranged delight. Gone are the fearsome images of nature under attack, I want to make pictures that engage and enhance as I do not believe you can expect people to defend and protect the natural world if they do not care for it. My drawings are labour intensive and involved, layered and erased, consuming and time-consuming. I lose myself when I make these pictures, just as I lose myself in the woods.