Join us on a Fantastical Safari

Kristjana S. Williams

I was born in Iceland, a place where the landscape itself feels alive, where moss grows over lava fields, glaciers sparkle, and the sky can turn from silver to violet in a moment. Growing up surrounded by such elemental contrasts light and dark sandy beaches, fire that heats our houses and ice, sea and fjords has really shaped the way I see the world. To me, nature has never been separate from magic; it has always been one and the same. That belief continues to guide my work as an artist and the studio where we create intricate, layered worlds that invite people to rediscover wonder in the everyday.

When we began The Fantastical Safari, I found myself so excited to start on a project that took the hard-to-

reach corners of the world into a visual form. Nature itself is the great conjurer. Every creature, every leaf, every coral reef is a work of surreal design. As artists, we only needed to listen and respond.

For years, our studio has explored surrealism through collage merging animals, architecture, and fragments of history into new chimeras. With The Fantastical Safari, the task was reversed: to look at the world’s genuine creatures and habitats and see how fantastical they already are. This realisation became our compass for the project.

As the author shared the journey of each chapter from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the dense jungles of Papua New Guinea we began to imagine how each landscape might breathe, sound, and glow. In the Trench, we set the scene against a background of near blackness, allowing the bioluminescent creatures to shimmer like distant stars beneath the sea. In Papua New Guinea, we shifted perspectives from the treetops gazing down upon the canopy to the shadowed undergrowth alive with unseen movement. Across the book, we played with skies and time: the pale light of dawn, the fire of sunset, and the mystery of night.

Collage is at the heart of all our work. For The Fantastical Safari, we used digital collage in its most intricate form. A Lightfoot crab, for instance, began as a single image, but its legs are formed from fragments of a stone crab, reassembled into new limbs; its body and face are shaped from forgotten engravings the curve of a woman’s portrait, the arch of a doorway combined to form a creature both familiar and new. The Arctic wolf’s fur, in another piece, is made of heron feathers — a meeting of air and ice. Once each being was born, we breathed colour into them and placed them within their true environments, alive with the scent and sound of their ecosystems.

In the end, we discovered that nature has always been the greatest storyteller wild, beautiful, and full of magic.

Kristjana S. Williams is an Icelandic artist and the founder of Kristjana S Williams Studio in London. Much of my work explores the intersection between nature and imagination how the natural world can feel both deeply real and otherworldly at the same time. Growing up in Iceland, surrounded by vast horizons, volcanic forms, and shifting light, I learned early on that landscapes can hold stories and spirits. That sensibility has shaped everything I create from large-scale collaborations with brands like Fortnum & Mason and Penhaligon’s, to immersive artworks for institutions such as the V&A and the Vatican. The Fantastical Safari felt like a natural continuation of that journey: a way to explore how wonder already lives within the world we know.