More life-like than the new statue of Sir David Attenborough at Madame Tussaud’s, Annette Marie Townsend’s remarkable botanical wax sculptures have powerful tales to tell
Words: Margaret Bartlett Photos: Dave Caudery Margaret Bartlett is the magazine’s production editor and and enjoys discovering the work of artists and craftspeople across the UK.
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.
This Cardiff-based natural history artist’s real passion is to communicate powerful tales of scientific discovery through her remarkable waxworks. Annette’s 2022 series ‘Aliens’ brought historic collections of non-native plants into vivid 3D colour, while the all-white and ghost-like ‘Flight of the Bumblebees’ is a reminder of the loss of our pollinator species. “I don’t want to make things just for the sake of making them – I want them to have a purpose and a value,” she explains. “I want the work to communicate what I feel is important and to elevate the scientific research being done, and talk about it with different audiences that might not see it otherwise.
“Findings are published in academic papers, but if you can publicise all those things to a wider audience, it raises awareness and helps people understand the cool science that’s going on, as well as the things that are important to change about the way we live so we can make positive change for the future.”
Annette’s childhood love of art lead to a degree in textile design. After graduating in 1995, she knocked on the door of Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales in her home town of Cardiff, to ask if they had need of a botanical illustrator.
“They said ‘yeah, great – can you draw dinosaurs?’ I said, ‘I’ll give anything a go!’” She went on to create dioramas and three-dimensional models, then was tasked with repairing the museum’s important collection of over 1,000 wax sculptures.
Botanical wax sculptures were hugely popular in Victorian times – part of that era’s fascination with cataloguing the natural world
