People, Proposition, Landscape – Meadow Arts at The Weir
Project Insights
Meadow Arts worked with National Trust Herefordshire to explore how visitors to The Weir Garden in Herefordshire could creatively engage with the landscape. Throughout the summer of 2024, we delivered a programme of artist-led activities in the Weir Garden’s various habitats. We explored the project’s themes through making, walking, and other creative activities that inspire conversation.
Between May and September, artists commissioned by Meadow Arts, led creative workshops for both existing and new audiences to discover their motivations for exploring landscape, and how best National Trust could design for that in their future programming.
Groups participating in the programme included Hereford Mind, Leominster Meeting Centre, Hereford 6th Form College and Earl Mortimer College. The artists commissioned to lead the activity included Chris Poolman, Emily Hedges, Emma Beynon, Celia Johnson, Harriet Carter, Daniel Pryde-Jarman and Sarah Boulton.
Public events included free artist-led workshops and interventions exploring the project’s themes through making, walking, and other creative, family-friendly activities that inspired conversation.
In October 2024, a project showcase was installed at The Courtyard, Hereford, further engaging the public with the National Trust’s plans for The Weir Garden as it expands from a 3.5-hectare garden to a 65-hectare valley during 2024-25. An expansive area of former farmland surrounding the Weir Garden will be transformed by the National Trust creating a new home for wildlife at The Weir with acres of woodland, orchards and wildflower meadows, significantly extending public access opportunities and increasing their public programmes.
You can find out more about The Weir Priority Habitat restoration project on the National Trust’s website.
Artists
Daniel Pryde-Jarman is an artist and curator whose research interests include institutional critique, the politics of display, and forms of self-organised artist-led culture.
Pryde-Jarman has been involved in setting up several artist-run spaces, including Grey Area in Brighton (2006 – 2012), and is currently Director of Meter Room project space & studios, an arts charity based in Coventry that provides affordable studio space to recent art graduates. Pryde-Jarman trained at the University of Brighton and Chelsea College of Arts, and completed his PhD in Curatorial Practice at Coventry University.
Celia is an artist based in Hereford, currently studying for a PhD and making work about an Industrial Estate in Wolverhampton. Her practice is about place, community and identity; she’s fascinated by how we encounter the world and its things and is interested in archives, psychogeography, scavenging, the post-industrial landscape, loss and precarity.
Sarah Boulton is an artist and forest school leader living in Hay on Wye. Recent artworks and poetry readings have been presented with Studio CYBI in North Wales; Bristol Beacon, Bristol; Burning House Books, Glasgow; Studio KIND, North Devon, and La Biennale de Momon, an immaterial art biennale in France. Boulton also makes participatory events and experimental workshops and runs the forest school project, Land Under Waves for her local community.
Emma Beynon is a qualified teacher and published travel writer. For the past 15 years she has been leading creative writing workshops for young people and adults in schools and the community. Her specific focus is Writing for Health and Wellbeing.
Dr Harriet Carter is an artist and researcher, and lectures in Fine Art at the University of Gloucestershire. Her studio is based at the Herefordshire-Worcestershire border. Harriet encounters various landscapes through her drawing practice, building layered paintings in response to these experiences.
Chris Poolman is an artist who recently returned to working as ‘himself’ when he undertook a 6-month residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall. This culminated in a commission for the Earthbound exhibition at the gallery called ‘The Sanctum of the One Eyed Toad’, a large-scale installation of cob (clay, sand, straw), other natural materials and reclaimed objects. Prior to this, he worked with Elizabeth Rowe in the collaboration General Public for over a decade. An important reference point in returning to making artwork again, were the 1970/80s adventure playground projects in Birmingham by former playworker Dave Swingle (whose archive we digitised as part of the ‘Let Us Play’ project). Their anarchic spirit and intense materiality are very much at odds with today’s managed environments and digital reliance.
Emily Hedges is an artist studying at Hereford College of Art where drawing is an important part of her practice. She is inspired by the qualities of materials, particularly textiles and ceramics, and often explores the traditions of craft to create work that reflects upon domestic life and the natural world.
Faith Limbrick is an artist based in South Shropshire, who works with moving image, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work investigates the functions of the imagination and its relationship to land and landscapes and the agency that non-human materials and creatures hold. The Untutored Builders of Space and Time (UBST) is semi-fictional umbrella organisation (one which can be put up then closed and stored in a cupboard somewhere) which creates temporary associations between participants where ideas and resources are shared and activities are coordinated. The UBST’s focus is on building, in whatever form that might materialise as.
Partners
The project is generously funded thanks to support from the UK Government Shared Prosperity Fund. It will provide £2.6 billion of funding for local investment by March 2025. The Fund aims to improve pride in place and increase life chances across the UK by investing in communities and places and supporting local businesses, people, and skills. For more information, visit the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
Related
People, Proposition, Landscape Showcase at The Weir Garden
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Project Launch
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People, Proposition, Landscape at NT The Weir Garden
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Drawing Nature with Harriet Carter
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Thinking Sticks – Stick Hire Service for Dogs
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Walk and Draw with Celia Johnson
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Poetry and Clay at The Weir: Part I
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Poetry and Clay at The Weir: Part II
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