“Inspired by my love of nature, ‘Fern Gil’ is a construct of my imagination, a divine embodiment of vegetation, a Forest Goddess, an emblem of the birth-death-rebirth cycle of the natural year. She is made of prehistoric ferns from the time dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and she has survived several mass extinctions. She speaks to us profoundly and serves as a powerful voice in today's ecological upheaval. It's our duty to protect this miraculous entity, as if she were a child in our care.

My greatest passion is storytelling and following my curiosity into the unknown, enjoying the freedom of layering and manipulating my photographs into creative montages. This is how ‘Fern Girl’ came to be. It started from a base image of a real child, followed by alterations in a digital process that took a couple of weeks, resulting in this carefully constructed composition revealing the influence of the great Surrealists and Old Masters.” Cristina Schek