For the series 'Seven questions with...' Art UK publishes interviews with emerging and established artists working today.

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 world-class climate science, and the urgent need to research, protect and care for the natural world.

Steph Roberts, Art UK: You started your career as a Scientific Artist at Amgueddfa Cymru. Can you tell us more about this?

Annette Marie Townsend: After graduating with my BA in General Textiles and Surface Pattern Design, I had an excellent portfolio of botanical drawings – flowers are a prominent motif in patterned textiles – so I approached the Keeper of Botany at Amgueddfa Cymru to ask if I could volunteer as a botanical illustrator. As ever in life, timing was key, and they were just starting work on a new scientific publication. But instead of flowers, I was asked to draw dinosaurs and Carboniferous swamp forest landscapes – quite different!

I was taken on as staff, and later qualified as a Natural Science Conservator. My work ranged from conserving specimens to moulding and casting replicas, and creating illustrations, sculptures and dioramas for the galleries.

Working in a museum has been a huge inspiration. I enjoy exploring the motivations that people have to collect, the systems for numbering and ordering, the repetition and variations between specimens, and how they are painstakingly mounted and displayed. I also love the grandiose museum buildings, how specimens (especially plants) are collected from all around the world and displayed in these manmade dark, cold spaces, often in a city – the juxtaposition of delicate plant material against stone, metal and glass.

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Steph: What's your favourite piece from the national collection?

Annette: Donald G. Rodney's My Mother My Father My Sister My Brother and In the House of My Father. I love the scale, and that it has been created from his own skin – such an unusual, personal and challenging material. It's tiny, fragile and seemingly insignificant. In the photograph, it looks as though the artist could easily crush it, yet the work is incredibly powerful.

There are so many narratives running through the piece: family, race, identity, home, medical intervention, mortality, pain and illness. Revisiting the work makes me realise how much it may have influenced my own practice.

My Mother My Father My Sister My Brother

Steph: Your work Creep touches on similar themes of pain and illness...

Annette: Creep is an intimate piece with a very personal meaning. It was difficult to make, but it's also the work that I'm most proud of. It's a sculpture that resembles an innocent daisy chain in the form of a choker necklace made to sit tightly around my throat. The roots reach down my back and touch the long surgical scar running the length of my spine. When I was 14 I was diagnosed with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, an 's' shaped curvature of the spine. I underwent major surgery which resulted in a 30 centimetre metal rod being wired to my vertebrae.

I've always felt self-conscious about my back, so the thought of having the piece photographed by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd on my body was difficult. But seeing how beautiful the images were was a breakthrough moment. I'd never seen a photograph of my back or scar before.

I named it Creep because of the creeping nature of the flowers, leaves and roots, and because of how I felt about myself and my body in the past.

It's about perfection and imperfection, beauty and value, and the power of nature to heal – but also our desire to manipulate it, and that underlying anxiety in the face of climate change.

Steph: Where do you see your role as an artist in the fight for climate justice?

Annette: As an artist, you always need to ask yourself 'Why? Why am I doing this?' The 'why' for me is always to make work that makes a difference in some way.

I hope my work makes people more inquisitive about the small, delicate and common things in nature which they might encounter every day. From insects in your garden to weeds growing from cracks in the pavement… that love of small nature can make a huge difference. If we appreciate and care about it on that level, it will lead to significant changes in the way we behave.

I also hope my artwork provides doorways for people to discover pioneering scientists and their research.

I'm a fairly quiet person but I really believe this is my calling. Through my work, I can speak loudly about something that matters.

Steph: Your work Paradise Lost was recently shown at 'Y Lle Celf' in the 2024 National Eisteddfod. What was the inspiration behind this work?

Annette: Paradise Lost is based on a Gala apple, a popular variety in the US. It's a solid sculpture created from wax newly produced by bees in their hives during apple pollination.

The work is a continuation of a collaboration between myself and Assistant Professor Scott McArt at Cornell University. Scott and his team collected the wax from an orchard in New York State and sent it to my studio in Cardiff. The wax was found to contain pesticide residues above the EPA and the EFSA's acute contact exposure levels of concern for honey bees. We've listed these agricultural chemicals as artist's materials.

The work aims to promote discussion on the man-made issues which have contributed to the global decline of pollinating insects.

The title references the epic poem by John Milton, first published in 1667, which tells the biblical tale of the Fall of Mankind, the Forbidden Fruit and Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden; the poem has inspired many artists and has an underlying concern with the end of the world.

Steph: You work a lot with traditional wax modelling techniques. Can you tell us about the process and why it appeals?

Annette: Wax has been used to create scientific models since the seventeenth century. Wax botanical modelling was particularly popular in the Victorian era, when many public museums were created. It was used to make realistic representations of plants, fruit and fungi for gallery displays. Wax flower-making was also a popular pastime for Victorian women and provided a means for some to earn an independent income.

Wax botanical sculptures are made from beeswax and paraffin wax melted and coloured with ground pigments. Materials like tinned copper wire, silk, paper and dressmaking beads can then be brushed with or dipped into the wax to make different plant parts, which are tied and fused together.

The process appeals to me because it's very slow, detailed and often meditative. Wax has a beautiful life-like quality. I enjoy creating works that seem real but also unreal, with a character and a life of their own. Sometimes my sculptures appear to be reaching for escape or walking away from their mounts!

I also enjoy exploring the value and meaning of beeswax as a contemporary art material and how that value has changed.

Steph: How do you define yourself as an artist?

Annette: I define myself as an interdisciplinary natural history artist. I enjoy the fact that my work is challenging to categorise, and I play with that in my work, by crossing the boundaries of art, craft, science and natural science conservation.

I never understood why science and art collections have been so divided in museums. This always frustrated me, because both collections are equally as valuable, and I always imagine the amazing possibilities when the two worlds collide.

Steph Roberts, Commissioning Editor Wales at Art UK

This content was supported by Welsh Government funding

Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is on display in the exhibition 'Homo Faber 2024: The Journey of Life', at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, from 1st to 30th September 2024

Further reading

Annette Marie Townsend and Sally Whyman, 'Aliens Escape the Herbarium', Natural Sciences Collections Association, 2023