“If I make work about the environment now, it’s as a form of protest.” Sculptor Anna in her Wiltshire studio.

Winding through a canopy of leaves, autumn hangs in the air on a grey day. The curves in the road create a building anticipation, hurtling us along. We reach a hamlet and lose our bearings. Eventually, we encounter a figure standing in the road, waving enthusiastically, with a warm grin.

This is Anna, the sculptor we’ve come to meet in the countryside outside Bath. She’s wearing a bright bandana and heavy walking boots, directing us into her studio. It’s a complex of brick buildings that make up a former paper bag factory around a central courtyard. 

She gives us a tour, including a walk to the compost toilet that is situated in a hut surrounded by woods and a stream. Meanwhile, her studio interior is all brick work and white plain surfaces.

Outside are three sculpted figures that form a motley welcome party, one leaning on its arm. When Anna sits beside them for a tea break, her bubbly demeanour contrasts against their sombre postures.

Our visit takes place as Anna’s latest work has received national and international acclaim. The ‘Sinking House’ sculpture, built in collaboration with Stride Treglown, the Bristol architecture firm, has been installed in the river in Bath by Pulteney Bridge, to raise awareness of the climate emergency. 

Anna made the figure that sat on top of a red monopoly house which was designed by Rob Delius of Stride Treglown. The person was clinging on top of the chimney, holding a banner for ‘COP 26’, the UN’s Climate Change Conference that took place in Glasgow. 

When viewed from a certain angle, the structure looks precariously close to floating downstream into the tugging current. It’s a symbol of the devastating climate-fuelled floods already happening around the world.

“The sinking house was an opportunity offered to me that I grabbed because it was a chance to use my art to contribute to something meaningful.” Anna says.

From an early age, she spent her childhood alongside her sister in the outdoors. It's no coincidence that they are both now acclaimed artists focused on nature in their work. Her sister Sarah explores loss of biodiversity, particularly mezzotints of moths. 

“We grew up in the countryside. We were always blowing birds eggs, getting right into the blackberries, and making syrups out of rosehips. We just lived in nature.”

Both Anna’s parents were artists and so she decided “to rebel by studying PPE at Oxford University” she tells us with a cackle, followed by International Relations at LSE. She’s always had a keen interest in politics, wanting to understand how the world works. It’s something she’d return to later. 

Her artistic calling beckoned her when she decided to study sculpture in Bath after university. She began creating sculptures to represent the relationship between people and their natural surroundings. Anna shows us two figures, their heads touching, covered in tiny acorns. 

“I made sculptures out of found tree materials based on a deep green idea. We tend to think that we as humans are separate from nature. But really, we’re not. Each tree makes thousands and thousands of acorns and that’s no different from the way that humans reproduce. Each one is the same and each one is different. We’re the same as an oak tree.”

This process of collecting amongst the oak trees was meditative and grounding, allowing her to spend hours in the fresh air. She’d sort each set of acorns from one tree into a box before heading out to collect more from another, a carefully curated homage. 

Over many years, a series of pieces developed. She created other sculptures in a similar vein casting found objects into bronze, including little figurines with leaves on their backs for wings. 

The materials she used and still uses today weighs on her mind. Anna tells us how hard it is to replace bronze in her work, which is notoriously environmentally unfriendly. You can tell that she’s her harshest critic, analysing if she’s done enough to live up to her own values.

She talks about a particular time when her outlook and approach to her art changed forever. 

“It was incredibly hot, and it just hit me one day. I was sitting in traffic on a road in London with my engine running and thought, ‘we’re killing ourselves’. It was as though I’d had a layer of skin peeled off. I could see the truth and the level of anxiety was horrible.”

This intense feeling of urgency didn’t go away. Anna began to question how she could do more personally to tackle climate change.

She joined Extinction Rebellion, the global environmental movement, and started using her artistic skills to raise awareness. This included printing posters and putting on performances. 

One of these pieces was called ‘Drowning in Oil’ that took place in London, a visceral enactment to protest widespread use of fossil fuels, with three performers on their knees spluttering. It was performed in Bath, St. Ives and Glasgow too.

She also worked on a banner that was hung covertly with Extinction Rebellion on Pulteney Bridge that read ‘We’re up Shit Creek’, metres from where the sinking house would later be installed.

The combination of using her practical skills and being part of a deeper vision is what Anna likes most about this sort of art.

There’s a clear line to be drawn between the iconic pink boat that Extinction Rebellion activists placed in a blockade on Oxford Street in London, and Stride Treglown’s red sinking house in the river in Bath. Simple striking objects that linger on in the imagination.

“I consider the sinking house to be protest art. It’s like making a banner as a visual communication.” she says.

Anna donates a percentage of her profits from her sculptures to environmental causes, such as Insulate Britain. The success of her work that celebrates nature can now be a force for protecting it. Attending the G7 summit to protest or buying shares in BP are ways that Anna feels she can have the most impact, rather than through her personal work.

Her fear about the planet also stems from being a mother, thinking about what future her sons will inherit. She now channels her climate anxiety into collaborating with others to create something powerful.

Meanwhile, Anna also explores other themes that matter to her, such as the latest sculptures she’s working on that focus on femininity and the ageing process. 

In the studio, she takes a break from talking to plaster a piece of an older woman with a long crack down her body. The Rolling Stones play in the background.

“I’m an artist and I care about the environment. But I’m also a woman who’s just gone through menopause, my children have left the nest, and my marriage has broken down. These are the things I need to talk about as an artist. So, I split this sculpture. It’s a self-portrait” she says, gesturing towards the table.

We talk about how the sinking house statue is a male figure. In a patriarchal public imagination, this is how humankind has always been depicted. To make the figure female would have turned it into a distracting talking point. It's a decision not taken lightly.   

Through her personal sculptures, Anna can reclaim her feminist voice. In her latest piece she celebrates the beauty and strength of the older female body, long flowing limbs. She alludes to the artist Louise Bourgeois, who also challenged notions of female representation. 

You can tell that Anna has come to balance different sides of her, a valuable lesson to any of us that you can integrate activism about the environment into your life in a balanced way. Her journey of speaking up for the planet and introspection create a distinct narrative through her work. 

Her latest body casts are an insight into Anna’s internal landscape, the angst and resilience all clustered together, embodied in split plaster. 

She talks about how she wishes we did not need to tackle climate change and could just live our lives. You can imagine her meandering back amongst the oak trees. But Anna relishes the chance to continue trying to do something, harking back to her political drive. 

She proudly holds up a sign for us that’s propped amongst the wall from a recent Extinction Rebellion protest. It reads “I’d rather be in bed with rebels than with Shell.”

For an artist who also displays her work in high end galleries, it’s a striking look, a reflection of the journey she’s on to becoming her most authentic self. 

Across the room, Anna’s acorn statue looks like the figures are grieving. They appear to be mourning the separation which she talks about so emotionally of nature and its inhabitants. 

She highlights the recent global weather events such as flooding in Germany and fires in Australia that should be an awakening about the climate emergency. 

Her sadness has manifested itself into a burning passion in her activism, as the full extent of humanity’s disconnection with its surroundings is revealed. 

“If I make work about the environment now, it’s as a form of protest.” she says. 

Her reflection has turned into reaction, a need to speak up for all those tiny acorns. It’s a reminder to us all to use our own skills in whatever way we can, to not become despondent when action is needed more than ever. She also shows it’s possible to enact change whilst retaining a good work life balance.

We leave Anna as she starts work on the next layer of her sculpture, dipping a big paintbrush into a black bowl and carefully dragging it across the plaster. 

You can feel her quiet retrospection being kept alive while she works in her lofty countryside studio, before she will storm off again onto the streets, microphone in hand.

You can find Anna on Instagram @annagillespiesculpture