Annette Marie Townsend

Annette Marie Townsend is a Welsh interdisciplinary artist specialising in the field of natural history, working from her urban garden studio in Cardiff. She is a recognised expert in wax botanical sculpture, a skill that she taught herself over 20 years while employed as a scientific artist and conservator at National Museum Wales. Her sculptures express a fascination with intricate detail, perfection and beauty, and explore human relationships with the natural world from an urban perspective. Her work is represented in public collections in the UK and private collections worldwide. She regularly collaborates with scientific institutions and has been commissioned by the National Botanic Garden of Wales, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London, and Cornell University, New York.

The technique of replicating plants with wax was popular in Britain during the Victorian era. Beeswax is a stable medium, lasting for thousands of years, and many wax plant sculptures survive in museum collections, but techniques have been lost over time and this is now a rare skill. Botanical wax sculptures are traditionally made from a mixture of beeswax and paraffin wax, melted together and coloured with pigments. The molten waxes are brushed onto wires to create stems; fabric and paper are dipped into the wax to make petals and leaves. These parts are fused together with metal sculpting tools heated over a flame and surface details are carefully added with brushes and acrylic paint to complete the final sculptures.

Annette's work is inspired by nature and the desire to communicate the beauty and fragility of the natural world. “When I first started working at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, I used to sit at the large wooden table in the herbarium, drawing illustrations of plants for scientific publications. One day a colleague took me to the store room where all the Botanical specimens were kept and showed me the cabinets and boxes full of beautiful wax plant models. I was mesmerised by them and I knew at that moment that I wanted to learn how to make them.” Because nowadays only a few people work in wax, she taught herself how to do it by reading the notebooks and archives of the botanical artists who had worked at the museum before her.

Next of Europe Exhibition