The Art Newspaper
September 2025
Stephen Todd, Emma Crichton-Miller,
Deyan Sudjic and Ruth Guilding
From Dior’s golden coat to landscape jewellery at Christie’s: where the worlds of art and luxury collide this autumn
A thrilling Dior debut in Paris for new creative director Jonathan Anderson, an earthy, wood-themed jewellery collection at Christie’s London by Natasha Wightman, a must-see doll’s house at the Rijksmuseum and shoe king Manolo Blahnik sponsors a V&A exhibition about Marie Antoinette
At the heart of Natasha Wightman’s new collection of jewellery, on display at Christie’s London from 8-23 October, is an unusual wood: bog oak. Dense, inky black and semi-fossilised in fenland bogs for thousands of years, Wightman describes it as “Britain’s memory in material form”.
The large mandorla-shaped designs she has created celebrate in intricate shallow relief the remaining British temperate rainforests, still standing in small sites from Dartmoor to Snowdonia. Carved in miniature by master carver Graham Heeley from fragments of ancient trees known as the Hemplands Haul—recovered from Norfolk’s Wissington fens—these artworks are then framed by Wightman with precious metals and gems. The emeralds, sapphires and diamonds reflect the environments of forest and coastline that the trees once covered, now denuded by modern farming, urban sprawl or coastal flooding. “These bog oak pieces carry the story of our lost ecosystem,” she says. “You are literally handling Britain’s history.”
Wightman hopes to draw attention to the living remnants of this threatened environment not just through the jewellery itself. It has been photographed being worn by young environmental activists Mya-Rose Craig and Erinna Miles to highlight the ongoing battle to study and preserve these habitats, accompanied by lyrical landscape and still-life photography by Tessa Traeger. The Christie’s launch will include an exclusive preview of Lost Forests, a documentary directed by Wightman, with a soundscape and live choreography. “I trained as a dancer,” Wightman says. “Because the pieces are wearable it was important to me that they should be understood through a physical medium as well as a visual one.”
Wightman came upon bog oak by chance. Her first jewellery collection, Ravens, released last year, was inspired by two birds she watched closely in the landscape around her Sussex home. For that project, she searched Britain for artisans who could help realise her designs, in the process creating a small team of specialist goldsmiths and carvers. They are conservators of a different type—of the vanishing tradition of miniature workmanship. Besides the ravens rendered in microscopic detail in 18-carat gold and solid silver, Wightman designed birds that were carved by Heeley from antler, jet and moorland boxwood. “I am always looking for materials that have a story and are indigenous to Britain,” she says.
It was reading campaigner Guy Shrubsole’s 2022 book The Lost Rainforests of Britain that alerted her to bog oak and led her on a journey to revisit Britain’s standing fragments of rainforest—only 27% of which are protected.
Out of these experiences were born the intensely realised miniature landscapes, shimmering with 24 carat shell gold palladium and white gold, that form the Lost Forests collection. Some pieces evoke snow-capped mountains or Dartmoor’s vast skies above a twisted mass of ancient oak branches intertwined with hazel, hawthorn and rowan. Others pursue traces of forest from Cornwall’s sculpted coastline, featuring a particular cove that Wightman has often visited, to Scafell’s secret streams.
A piece that can be worn as a brooch or pendant, called Eye of Nature, is particularly immersive. Dense and intricate carving precisely delineates a tunnel of tangled roots and branches, shimmering with black and teal-tinted diamonds. Among the other pieces are earrings featuring snow-dusted Scots pines and another pair featuring a more abstract pattern of delicate ferns, fringed with emeralds.
The fragility of these precious landscapes is offset in all these artworks by the calm resilience of the bog oak, and the enduring brilliance of the jewels. Wightman’s pieces communicate an urgent story in ways that allow us still to revel in the inherent beauty of these ancient materials.
