Annette Marie Townsend b. 1973

Annette Marie Townsend is a Welsh contemporary artist based in Cardiff, renowned for her singular wax botanical sculptures. Originally trained as a textile designer, she began illustrating flowers for the Botany department at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, a role that sparked her lifelong engagement with scientific study.

While employed at the museum for more than 20 years, Townsend held a dual role: as a Scientific Artist, she mastered diorama creation, modelmaking, and scientific illustration; as a Natural Science Conservator, she cared for millions of specimens, including a collection of over 1,000 delicate wax botanical sculptures, which she learned to sculpt herself in order to understand their preservation. She continues to engage with conservation through her role as director of a conservation CIC, while working as a full-time artist, ensuring her sculptural practice remains informed by deep expertise in collection care.

In a re-evaluation of historic craft techniques and material intelligence, she elevates beeswax flower-making, once considered a female parlour hobby, into a contemporary medium of precision and significance, where the female hand becomes the quiet translator of cutting-edge scientific knowledge. Her work is deeply layered, exploring empathy and lived experience, informed in part by her own life, including adolescent corrective scoliosis surgery, which exposed her to imperfection and the nuanced beauty of recovery.

Townsend collaborates internationally with leading scientists, including entomologists at Cornell University and plant researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, translating ecological and environmental research into sculptural form. Her work is informed not only by scientific inquiry but also by a profound reverence for the natural world and its capacity to heal and inspire. Site-specific projects such as Aliens, created from beeswax harvested from hives on the roof of National Museum Cardiff, link material, place, and ecology, while works such as Creep reflect personal experience and the regenerative power of nature.

Her sculptures are held in museum collections including National Museum Cardiff and Big Pit National Coal Museum, and she has exhibited widely in the UK, such as at Collect, Somerset House, London, and internationally at Homo Faber, Venice, and Fine Art Asia, Hong Kong. Commissions include conservation and sculptural projects for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the National Botanic Garden of Wales; Manchester Museum; English Heritage; and the BBC. Each work is meticulously crafted, small in scale yet conceptually rich, renowned for its rarity and the depth of the narratives it embodies.

Photography: Dewi Tannatt Lloyd