It’s not easy finding the home of Beatrice Forshall. It lies at the end of a long Devon lane, through a farmyard and a gate and down a rough track leading deep into a valley.
Beatrice doesn’t drive, which at first is surprising, then a little worrying, as this cottage is seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but not long after meeting the artist, thoughts of car-based connections to the human world, seem irrelevant.
Over coffee we talk about swimming in rivers and exploring nearby Dartmoor. Beatrice loves to wander these wild places, she says she climbs the tors, even in the dark. ‘Just hearing the wind, it’s so ancient, there’s something so old. I’ve fallen for it.’
Beatrice was born and grew up in a remote part of France, where ‘the meadows were so full of life’.
‘I spent so much time outside,’ she says. ‘It was fizzing with life and so much colour.’
The cottage where she lives now is wrapped in wildness, concealed among trees, and hedges, grasses and flowers cluster up to the front door. Her stone-walled studio sits close the house; we’re careful not to disturb the swallows.
Beatrice comes from a family of artists, her mum is a painter, dad a photographer and her sisters are artists too. Her parents swap time between here and France, but Beatrice, who came to Exeter School after another period of time living in Spain, seems very settled in this corner of Devon.
Creativity is in her DNA, and so is a love of the natural world.
As a child she was passionate about animals, making papier mache creatures to sell in local markets and raise money for wildlife charities and conservation. She recalls reading the newsletters she was sent from WWF. ‘I remember being so anxious about what was going on,’ she says.
After an initial desire to study zoology or work in conservation, she followed her artistic instincts and went to Falmouth College of Art to study illustration, specialising in dry-point engraving in her final year.
It’s a labour-intensive method, drawing, engraving, printing and colouring by hand. She works large scale, using zinc plates and print runs are short, rarely more than 25.
‘I like the energy, the printing and using the press, it’s quite physical,’ she says. ‘‘You ever know how it will turn out, what it will look like in the end.’
He subject matter is wildlife and she has exhibited her work across the country. Her book, The Book of Vanishing Species, came out of an artist residency with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, which is a collaboration between researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the University of Cambridge and leading biodiversity organisations.
Beatrice has also worked with the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, Birdlife and Flora & Fauna International, as well as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, all of which has given her an insight into the realities of the global state of nature depletion.
For someone who cares so deeply about animals, it must have been a distressing experience to learn what the scientists were discovering.
‘I can’t read about how beautiful the world is without sadness,’ she says. ‘You know what we are risking.’
‘It is so upsetting. You lose a little faith in your own species.’
But she adds, ‘The way to cope with it, with this eco-anxiety, is to do.’
Beatrice cites Jane Goodall as her hero, ‘she holds such serenity, she enters people’s hearts and minds’, and her own gentle persistence and strength comes across as we talk.
She wants to make a difference, to use her work to help nature and so she decided to ‘tell the stories’ of the animals she was hearing about, both through her artwork and through words - the two combined are important, she feels, as they each have an impact.
The Book of Vanishing Species is a book of stories of about 70 endangered species. Beatrice researched, wrote and illustrated it. It took her 18 months, during which time, as she notes in her introduction, 107 species were declared extinct.
She hopes this extraordinary book will be ‘a step towards caring,’ of ‘getting to know the lives of other creatures’. Reading it leads to a gamut of emotions, from joy and wonder at their incredible lives, to sadness, anger and utter despair at what is happening to them and their environments.
It contains beautiful descriptions, like that of a mother sea otter, ‘as she winds kelp around her baby to anchor it, making sure it will not drift away while she is foraging’, ‘ or the Sinai baton blue butterfly which ‘when they fly, it is as if tiny pieces of the sky have fallen and are trying to find a home among the plants’.
There are endearing yet mid-boggling facts. The eastern curlew who flies from Australia to Siberia where, despite being drained of energy, the male has to prove his fitness to the female by ‘ascending 15m vertically, singing to her all the way’. Or the European eel which returns to the Sargasso Sea where it was born ‘on a turn in a new moon’, changing its body so it can adapt from river to sea conditions, even land, on its 5,000km journey.
Then there are the North Atlantic whales whose families sing their unique songs, compositions that are passed down generations and across populations, through the oceans. But It’s harder for them to hear their songs, or communicate, due to the increasing man-made underwater noises. Beatrice finds their story profoundly moving. ‘They don’t have a quiet home any more.’
Working with researchers gave her insight into creatures she’d never heard of, and which are little known, like the olm.
This near translucent cave dweller, part eel-like, part lizard, can be found on the eastern side of the Aegean, in ‘the perpetual night of the caves where it lives’. It’s been in existence for 110 million years and an individual can live to be 100 years old and yet it may become extinct due to habitat disturbance, pollution - and because it is in demand for the pet trade.
‘It’s an extraordinary creature’ says Beatrice. ‘It’s survived so much, and yet what we are doing to it... it’s desperate.’
Beatrice will sometimes work late, through the quiet night-time hours, listening to owls and going to bed on hearing the dawn chorus.
‘I’ve never felt alone. I’d see the stars and feel connected to something else.’
Beatrice will forever be close to nature and she says she’d love to speak to the animals she’s written about and drawn. ‘You feel you don’t need anything else when you connect to an animal, there is a real peace,’ she says.
But as for encountering the animals in Vanishing Species...
‘We have so much to learn from them. Their lives are different to us, but also similar.’
‘On a selfish level I’d like to see them,' she adds, 'but... I think often they just need to be left on their own...’
The Book of Vanishing Species by Beatrice Forshall is published by Bloomsbury, £25
