City Songbirds

Anna Walsh is a British artist and designer living and working in London, whose work explores human interactions with the natural world.

 

Born and living in London until she was 10, and then moving to Worcestershire where her auntie lived on a farm that she visited regularly, meant she had a mixture of country and city upbringing. In 2000 she returned to London to study her MA and has lived in South- East London ever since. Her love of nature and animals has remained with her and is reflected in the recurring themes of her work, often with an urban twist or wryly humorous undertone.

 

Fiction, hearsay, and that which is factual, interest her as well as the intersections in between, as these are often the most interesting and revealing about us and our interactions with animals. Her work is a combination of drawing, photography and digital processes, culminating in print-based work, including screen prints, digital prints, cyanotypes and digital prints. She uses playful compositions to draw the viewer in to look closer and express her never ending wonder of the variety of animal life on earth.

 

She often appropriates vintage natural history educational illustration formats, maps, charts, diagrams and methods of categorising to convey the themes she explores, to realise her visual narratives. Charts and maps have a certain authority, and she is interested in questioning this and the accuracy and form of the information presented.

 

Research is an important part of her practice, and she may spend many hours reading, searching, visiting exhibitions and listening to inform the outcomes, as well as sparking the initial ideas.

 

Anna graduated from Camberwell College of Arts (UAL) in 2001 with MA in Artists Books and has exhibited widely since. She is also a Director and Co-founder of the artist collective Garudio Studiage and a member of ArtCan.

 

Her work is held in many private collections, as well as Tate Gallery Artists Book collection and she was shortlisted for the Derwent Drawing prize in 2024.

 

Screen Print Hand Coloured with Watercolour (variable edition)

50x40cm

Unframed

Edition 6/14