Anne Guest

Biography

My art practice is an exploration of natural sciences including current medical research and natural history. I combine this with the symbolism of Vanitas and Memento Mori that includes skulls, butterflies, flowers and shadows to reference the transience of life and the fragility of human existence.

i like to emulate the sense of awe and wonder associated with the cabinets of curiosities or wunderkammer that were first established in the seventeenth century in an attempt to categorise and tell stories about the wonders of the natural world, offering a strange link between ancient myth and scientific reality. 

i respond to the current relationship with the natural world which man seems determined to destroy whilst simultaneously re creating, cloning and de extincting.

i am currently concerned with the relationship between plants, insects and birds – the often overlooked indicators of the changing climate. 

there is already evidence that the delicate balance of their interdependent lifecycles is being disrupted. pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, visit flowers to harvest their nectar and pollen; they are essential for flower reproduction and, as their lifecycles are becoming increasingly out of synchronization, they decline. 

some of the work represents current facts such as plight of the bumblebees and fading beauties. these drawings depict the actual number of species of bumblebees and butterflies currently critically endangered in UK.