Artists

Grace Emily Manning & Chris Poolman

About

Grace Emily Manning is an artist who grew up in the suburbs of London, on the border of Kent along the Thames Estuary. She creates multimedia projects that respond directly to landscape and place, drawing inspiration from the ecology, history, folklore, and materials of each site. This site-specific practice has led her on a journey into nature-based materialism; making natural dyes, inks, pigments, and sculptures from locally sourced materials. Her work explores environmental themes and speculative sci-fi ideas for futures where humans live in true collaboration with nature.

Grace regularly works with communities to co-create large-scale public artworks across the UK, deepening her relationship with this island, its people, and its natural world.

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.