Perched on his desk at his home office is the jackdaw that inspired Lord Goldsmith to make his first bronze sculpture. Although Jilly the jackdaw is no longer part of Zac Goldsmith's life, her likeness is both a memento of the fledgling he raised to adulthood and the inception of his hobby as a sculptor.
Zac is now staging his first exhibition of sculptures, adding "professional artist" to credentials that include life peer, former government minister, magazine editor and conservationist.
Zac had sculpted before, using a chainsaw to fashion a larger-than-life gorilla out of a fallen oak tree at his home in the New Forest, but it was the isolation of lockdown that led him to experiment with clay and wax.
His first subject was the jackdaw, which had fallen down a chimney. Zac guessed that Jilly was a female.
"It's very hard to sex a jackdaw," he says in an exclusive chat with HELLO!. "You can't tell the difference. I say 'she' just because she was very flirty."
© KAREN BENGALL PHOTOGRAPHYHe fed her over "three or four weeks" until she could fly, taking her everywhere with him. "I would go for walks. She'd sort of fly up into the trees, come back down, but she was very dependent on me for a while. Then she became less and less dependent."
Zac eventually lost contact and suspects that she reached the end of her natural life. He used wax to recreate her, working while reading his government papers or between virtual meetings at odd hours of the day and night while serving as a minister for the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office – a post he resigned in 2023.
He sent the finished sculpture to a foundry in Hampshire to use the "lost-wax process", a method of replicating the shape of wax in bronze that dates back to antiquity. Most of his art is on a grander scale: baby elephants, giant tortoises, gorillas, big cats and wolves.
His motive, apart from the fun of it, is to satisfy demands from charities. "I'm always asked to provide valuable things for auctions, almost always for nature-related things or animal welfare," he says. "I've run out of interesting things to provide from my own house. So I took the gamble of adding one of my bronzes to an auction and it sold very well. There was a bidding war for it."
© KAREN BENGALL PHOTOGRAPHYHis sculptures have collectively raised more than £500,000 for charities including Animals Asia’s campaign to end the farming of bear bile, expanding the Blue Belt marine reserves and conservation work for Space for Giants. Proceeds from sale from his exhibition at Noho Showrooms in Fitzrovia, central London, will go to causes in Central America, including Yaba Chic Wildlife Conservation, an organisation he set up to rescue and rewild injured or confiscated animals.
Zac has no formal art training and honed his skills by trial and error, using nit combs to create the look of fine hair and cheese graters for coarser textures.
One error was to leave a wax giant tortoise on a table in his office where the afternoon sun shone through a window. "I came back [after three days away] and it was just a huge blob of melted wax. It had been a tortoise – I think a very good tortoise – but it wasn't by the time I came back."
Zac's exhibition comes after a tumultuous year. In September, he married Hum Fleming, a fashion and lifestyle PR and the great niece of the James Bond novelist Ian Fleming. His mother Lady Annabel, the socialite and philanthropist who lent her name to Annabel’s night club in Mayfair, joined the celebrations only to die a few weeks later at the age of 91.
"I feel very lucky that she was there," Zac says. "Not just there, but she was in good shape. She was very much involved and very much took part in everything. I think back at how vital she was at that time. It's hard to reconcile that with her not being around just a few weeks later.
© Getty"We obviously all miss her very much but, at the same time, I think it's very lucky for us and probably for her as well, that she didn't [suffer]. There was no kind of dramatic moment of decay. Her brain was working on all cylinders. She was physically still strong.
"There was no drama, no fear. It just happened very suddenly, which I think is probably what we all want."
Asked what quirky moments there were at his wedding, he admits a moment of carelessness when he was engrossed in conversation with his nephews. "My elbow nudged Hum’s handbag further into the table. It was a very special, beautiful Lulu Guinness lips clutch. I pushed it right into the way of the candle. As I was chatting I suddenly noticed this burning smell. It was blazing on fire."
He doused it with a bottle of water but the bag was "a write-off", he says. "I wasn't wonderfully popular."
His sculptures are often recreations of memories. His elephants recall a visit to Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, where he gathered eight fellow environment ministers to persuade them to agree on a plan of action.
"By the end of it we were all covered in a very red African mud, but we were also all in agreement about the stuff that I was hoping we'd all agree."
His giant tortoises come from a visit to the Galápagos, where he was handed a baby one and asked to name her. Jane, named after the primatologist Jane Goodall, still roams the island despite her namesake’s death in October.
Zac, who has six children from two previous marriages, based his gorillas on one he met twice – first at Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent and, later, after it was released in the Congo. He recalled their first encounter when his son James, now 23, was four.
© James Whatling"There were some young gorillas running around on the lawn. We were very lucky to be able to hang out with these gorillas. One of them chased him all the way to a tree, tripped him up and ripped off his trousers. We all thought it was very funny."
Zac caught up with the same gorilla 18 years later, after it had been released by The Aspinall Foundation. "I obviously wasn't going to let him rip my trousers off now he's a full silverback, so I didn't get too close to him, but I was in a little canoe and he was on the banks of the river."
Previous buyers of Zac’s art include Thomas Kaplan, a wildcat conservator and collector of Rembrandt works, and Trudie Styler, who shares an interest in conservation with her husband, Sting. Zac says that there have been some "early bids" for the works on display.
Asked if the King, a fellow environmentalist and the stepfather of Zac’s friend Tom Parker Bowles, might be a bidder, Zac says he can only hope. "I would love to say that the King will be striding into the exhibition and walking away with one of the giant tortoises, but I can't guarantee that.
"He's really one of the grandfathers of environmentalism. He's been banging the drum since the days when really no one was talking about it, when it seemed a bit cranky and niche. He just does this stuff and is incredibly effective, so I don't think I would charge him if he wanted one of them."
Art for Nature: Sculptures by Zac Goldsmith runs until 28 February at Noho Showrooms, London - visit here
