“Annette Marie Townsend’s intricate, hyper-realistic sculptures explore our relationship with nature, our bodies, and the desire to collect, study and understand the natural world. Renowned for her skills in traditional wax botanical modelling techniques, she uses her work to highlight climate science and the urgent need to protect the natural world.”

“Intricate, exquisite and astonishingly life-like, Annette Marie Townsend’s botanical wax sculptures are almost shocking in their realism. But these painstakingly rendered, delicate works of art are not just pretty things; each twist of a root and blush of colour on a petal has a deeper story to tell about our relationship with the natural world.”

“The making of wax botanical sculptures was a popular practice in Victorian Britain, part of that age’s great drive to catalogue the natural world… a technique that has largely been lost, except in the work of certain exceptional individuals, such as Annette Townsend… Her ‘Life Support’ series documents early spring during the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown: hauntingly beautiful reminders of a shared moment in which the fragility of life was newly, brutally, laid bare.”

“I’m interested in scientific collections, the reasons why people covet them, and how things are stored and displayed in museums,” says Annette. “It’s this collision between the natural world and these hard materials… I like this idea of the plants almost trying to come to life and get out.”

“These flowers are a fusion between art, craft and science. They are a paradox, a celebration of a future catastrophe. I think of James Lees-Milne’s sentence: ‘The field next door, which has been improved, utterly dead like a landscape on the moon.’ Dead bees, dead fields, dead us.”

“It’s almost as though she’s turned the volume up on nature, and it’s just really timely.”

“It is, it is — and yet her work, you know, she’s been working on this for so many years. It’s just at this moment in time, just as you say, seems to be so incredibly pertinent to our current position.”