David Freda combines consummate skills as a jeweller and enamellist with a naturalist’s lifetime experience of observing the more elusive elements of the natural world. The cyclical drama of birth, metamorphosis and death is given form in this necklace based on the life cycle of the stag beetle, with cast and enamelled elements depicting the insect as a grub and an adult, nourished with raspberries. Birds, insects, fish, invertebrates and reptiles have been sources of talismanic imagery for centuries, as jewellers and object makers transformed revulsion into wonderment in the eroticised landscape of the human body. Freda’s work evokes the Art Nouveau style of French glassmaker Emile Gallé and jeweller René Lalique, but is realised through a sharper lens of inquiry, scientific observation and technical innovation. We are used to the close observation of nature through advanced photography and imaging techniques, but Freda’s hyper-reality takes us into the theatre of the real and mesmerises us with its performance.