Annette Warner

Annette Warner is a non-binary British artist working between London and Southampton. They look at the plasticity of society, and the plasticity of ourselves.

While studying BA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, they received the 2019 Nancy Balfour Award in New Media.

They have since founded, and currently co-direct, ZEST Collective (est. 2020). Based in Southampton, ZEST has successfully delivered two artist-led projects with the support of Arts Council England.

Selected recent exhibitions include Ripe FIVE, Gods House Tower, Southampton (2023); Snappy Title, The Winchester Gallery, Winchester (2023); and Soft/Hard, Bermondsey Project Space, London (2023); alongside organising and managing group exhibitions: Polymer Waves (2023), Novum Citri (2022), and Dystopia Holdings (2022), within ZEST Collective.

"Plastic vibrates with the vitality of the social lives with which it is enmeshed. Plastic is animated; it has flesh and bones and it dances along the road."

(Caroline Knowles)

My practice looks at how we are taught to see, how the texture of categorisation melts, hardens and abstracts under the heat of time.

Interrogating how the materials that define the age we live in act as a mimicry of us, I explore the ways in which we are plastic; moulding and moulded by the circumstances that happen to us.

Melting, stretching, breaking

I consider how the devices that capture our lived experience redefine us. How do we categorise ourselves in a digital age? How are we formed and transformed?

Image credit: Sylke van der Heiden