My practice began in the basement stores of the museum, dark spaces of study, care, and stewardship, often overlooked in favour of the white-walled galleries above. After more than two decades working within natural history collections as a Scientific Artist and Conservator, I became attuned to the hierarchies that shape what is seen and valued.
My work operates as a mezzanine, lifting modes of making and knowledge towards the light while remaining grounded in their origins. Using wax, I reconstruct botanical forms that sit between specimen and sculpture. They hold states of beauty, damage, and healing, and register both preservation and change. The material carries traces of past lives: human, insect, agricultural, and industrial. These histories are reconfigured within each work.
The works are encountered first as real. Then they are not. This double take is not an illusion but a shift in position. What appears stable begins to unsettle. The act of looking becomes part of the work’s structure. Quiet, precise, and materially complex, the works draw on scientific research, conservation, and lived experience. They resist simple classification. They hold attention in a state of suspension, between care and interference, repair and alteration. Even the smallest forms assert a disproportionate presence.
In a time of ecological crisis, the work attends to what persists in the natural world, and our place within it.
Biography
Annette Marie Townsend is a Welsh contemporary artist based in Cardiff, known for her wax botanical sculptures. Originally trained as a textile designer, she began her career illustrating plant specimens for the Botany Department at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, initiating a long-term engagement with scientific collections.
Over more than two decades at the museum, Townsend held a dual role as Scientific Artist and Natural Science Conservator. She developed expertise in model making, diorama construction, and scientific illustration, while also caring for extensive collections of specimens. This included historic wax botanical models, which she learned to reconstruct as part of their conservation, developing a rare and highly specialised understanding of their material construction and preservation.
Her practice is grounded in this sustained, hands-on engagement with collections and their care. Working in beeswax, she draws on historic model making techniques, repositioning them within a contemporary context. Each work is developed through a slow and meticulous process, resulting in sculptures that are materially precise, limited in number, and inherently rare.
Townsend collaborates with scientists and institutions internationally, including Cornell University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, translating ecological and collection-based research into sculptural form.
Her work is held in public collections including National Museum Cardiff and Big Pit National Coal Museum. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including at Collect, Somerset House, London; Homo Faber, Venice; and Fine Art Asia, Hong Kong. Commissions include projects for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the National Botanic Garden of Wales; Manchester Museum; English Heritage; and the BBC.
My practice began in the basement stores of the museum, dark spaces of study, care, and stewardship, often overlooked in favour of the white-walled galleries above. After more than two decades working within natural history collections as a Scientific Artist and Conservator, I became attuned to the hierarchies that shape what is seen and valued.
My work operates as a mezzanine, lifting modes of making and knowledge towards the light while remaining grounded in their origins. Using wax, I reconstruct botanical forms that sit between specimen and sculpture. They hold states of beauty, damage, and healing, and register both preservation and change. The material carries traces of past lives: human, insect, agricultural, and industrial. These histories are reconfigured within each work.
The works are encountered first as real. Then they are not. This double take is not an illusion but a shift in position. What appears stable begins to unsettle. The act of looking becomes part of the work’s structure. Quiet, precise, and materially complex, the works draw on scientific research, conservation, and lived experience. They resist simple classification. They hold attention in a state of suspension, between care and interference, repair and alteration. Even the smallest forms assert a disproportionate presence.
In a time of ecological crisis, the work attends to what persists in the natural world, and our place within it.
Biography
Annette Marie Townsend is a Welsh contemporary artist based in Cardiff, known for her wax botanical sculptures. Originally trained as a textile designer, she began her career illustrating plant specimens for the Botany Department at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, initiating a long-term engagement with scientific collections.
Over more than two decades at the museum, Townsend held a dual role as Scientific Artist and Natural Science Conservator. She developed expertise in model making, diorama construction, and scientific illustration, while also caring for extensive collections of specimens. This included historic wax botanical models, which she learned to reconstruct as part of their conservation, developing a rare and highly specialised understanding of their material construction and preservation.
Her practice is grounded in this sustained, hands-on engagement with collections and their care. Working in beeswax, she draws on historic model making techniques, repositioning them within a contemporary context. Each work is developed through a slow and meticulous process, resulting in sculptures that are materially precise, limited in number, and inherently rare.
Townsend collaborates with scientists and institutions internationally, including Cornell University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, translating ecological and collection-based research into sculptural form.
Her work is held in public collections including National Museum Cardiff and Big Pit National Coal Museum. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including at Collect, Somerset House, London; Homo Faber, Venice; and Fine Art Asia, Hong Kong. Commissions include projects for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the National Botanic Garden of Wales; Manchester Museum; English Heritage; and the BBC.