Yew Path Drawing

Celia de Serra spent her childhood in rural Kent and West Dorset graduating from Exeter University with a Fine Art and English degree. Post degree her art practice was predominately concerned with abstraction but she retained an obsession and attachment to her rural roots and went on to produce a body of work investigating and responding to farming, tourism and the timber industries impact upon rural environments, from the West Country to Shropshire and Wales. Celia is engaged intensely in the act of looking, and concentrates on a kind of visual scrutiny to which the viewer is drawn, generating a particular viewer involvement and a visceral sense of ‘being there’. She is also a founding member of 'The Arborealists', a group of artists who exhibit together to promote the theme of trees in contemporary art. Celia has completed commissions for both Somerset and Dorset NHS Trusts where a collection of her paintings now remain on permanent display. She has been granted awards for her drawings from the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust. Her work is also in private collections in the UK and Europe. She continues to embrace the disciplines of drawing, photography and painting as a means to document and elaborate further the places she knows and cares about before they are lost. "In finding an image that might resonate, and through remaking it, I hope to reconcile my engagement and love for the natural world with an increasing sense of horror at the abuses we have, and continue to inflict upon it."