Anna Thurber

A personal experience Anna Thurber is a Boston-based artist who works at the intersection of sculpture, performance, floral arrangements and photography. She produces intimate, up close photography of carefully arranged and composed botanicals. They are immersed in water and frozen in varying temperatures so that the ice forms layers of lenses through with the camera can pick up an incredible level of detail. Anna is a prolific artist with a number of ice sculptures in parallel and sometimes multiple photographs per piece. Her ultimate goal as an artist is to archive New England’s extensive flora and document how it changes throughout seasons and years.Therefore, the brief for the website was wide-reaching: How might we give her an opportunity to showcase the breadth of her work beautifully and invite in customers from around the world to learn more about her, browse her work and get in touch with her for conversation and purchase.Our initial customer research revealed just how emotional an experience selecting art is, especially online.  People want to feel a personal connection to a piece and the artist. We solved this by making a twofold experience: 

1. We built an informational part to the website to give an overview over Anna, her work,  her technique and exhibitions. This heavily features photography and videos to bring it to life and give a view behind the curtain.
2. We built a way for users to find a piece they can connect with, by choosing a set of colours, atmospheres and plant species. They get served individual images that fit their taste, and a simple way to change the search. Each detail page for every single piece of art is unique, and entirely driven by the data pulled from the image and associated by the artist. 

To power all this, we also built a custom app for Anna to catalogue her work, The Living Archive. This enables her to build the ever-growing archive of her work over time, but is also directly linked to the website. This makes updating her archive part of her daily practise, and gives us a real-time glimpse into her body of work.