Something About Rocks

Natasha Wightman’s Lost Forests

Inspired by Britain’s lost woodlands artist and jeweller Natasha Wightman explains how this led to her new jewellery collection Lost Forests

Deep below the layers of peat in England’s East Anglian wetlands like the ghosts of a Lost Forest that’s been sleeping for thousands of years. Once a forest of mighty oaks spread from coast to coast across the British Isles. Unlike today’s oak trees these specimens were 100 foot high Goliaths, towering in straight rigid lines up to the sky with their canopy bursting to the clouds. Having been buried 5000 years ago when a mighty tsunami crashed into the British shores they’ve re-emerges, hardened and blackened by time and have found their way into the hands of British artist and jeweller Natasha Wightman.

Following her last work, Ravens, a collection of fine jewellery inspired by these magnificent birds her new seven piece collection, Lost Forests, that exhibited in Christies this month, is a multidisciplinary exploration that fuses the worlds of fine jewellery, sculpture, film, and performance. Wightman invites the viewer and the wearer of her pieces to look back in time to the wilds of prehistoric Britain, and reconnect with what she calls “our deep environmental memory.” At its core lies the story of bog oak: sub-fossilised wood from Britain’s long-lost rainforests, of which only 1% remain today. Her aim is to draw attention to the last remaining temperate forests and wilds in the UK before they disappear.

“I wanted to tell this ancient story through different mediums,” Wightman says, “enabling people to connect in different ways to Lost Forests by having a multi-sensory, 360 experience. I trained as a dancer and understand how movement, sound and touch can resonate deeply.”

That sense of movement — of transformation — runs through everything she creates. Working with master carver Graham Heeley, Wightman has turned the dense, dark oak from the Hemplands Haul into sculptural jewellery. Cuffs and pendants have been carved in relief, their surfaces alive with twisting branches, ferns, and the glint of gold dust and precious stones. Emeralds echo moss on stone, sapphires shimmer like water, and the ancient wood beneath them holds a story of nature surviving in fragments.

“I’ve always been inspired by nature, through to the smallest of details,” she continues. “The story of how bog oak was formed is fascinating to me. Visiting today’s ancient rainforests, namely Cabilla on Bodmin Moor was greatly inspiring. Through my work I wanted to highlight these rare forests’ plights. Only one percent of our rainforests now remain.”

Her jewellery pieces have been carved from five vast planks of oak, that are dated to between 4,800 and 5,500 years old. The sculpture evokes the feeling of standing beneath a prehistoric canopy, shafts of light breaking through the darkness. It’s a reminder that these huge giants once spread across all the British Isles.

The Lost Forests project also extends into film and performance. The film, featuring and directed by Wightman, zooms in on the natural world, featuring photography by Tessa Traeger and Thomas Birkett of the wild coasts of Cornwall, mountainous Snowdon and the temperate forests of Dartmoor. Layered in amongst this are the relief sculptures she’s created with Heely while the sound features haunting vocals an echo of a lost world. “I would describe myself as a multidisciplinary artist,” says Wightman. “Each series of work I’ve created has always been about sound, movement, film and sculpture.”

Wightman also invited young British conservationists, Dr Mya-Rose Craig and Erinna Miles to be photographed wearing the pieces. She was keen to show real people and not models wearing her jewellery. Their inclusion shows that Lost Forests isn’t just an artistic project but also a quiet act of activism. “The pieces aren’t only a celebration of the land that once existed,” she says, “but by placing endangered landscapes or fauna as the central focus, the hand-crafted relief works act as a reminder of what fragments we have left in Britain that need our understanding and protection, as do our heritage skills, which are also critically endangered.”

Each piece is the result of a painstaking collaboration between multidisciplinary of artists, carvers and goldsmiths, combining thousands of man hours. Blackened silver, 18-carat gold and hand-applied natural pigments echo the tones of forest and sea, while precisely set diamonds, emeralds and sapphires bring light into the darkness of the oak.

Wightman’s work reminds us that Britain’s wild beauty is both fragile and formidable, and that her pieces like the forests themselves can be a form of preservation. “When someone wears a piece from Lost Forests,” she says, “they’re carrying a fragment of Britain’s lost rainforests with them. It becomes a daily reminder of both what we’ve lost and what we still need to protect.”