The Golden Valley Sundial
This Artwork featured at Gwatkins Cider Festival, Hellens Manor and Hay Castle (2026). A Meadow Arts commission.
Created with communities across the Golden Valley, the county’s most remote, southwest corner, this outdoors installation combines sculpture, game-play and storytelling. Inspired by folk history, farming traditions and life in rural Herefordshire, the work depicts a series of twelve new folk-icons, and stories shared by members of the rural community. Made from natural and locally sourced materials including cob, wool and plant dyes, the work draws upon the area’s unique landscape, wildlife and historic monuments.
Chris Poolman and Grace Emily Manning developed the project over many months, through regular and pop-up workshops for residents. Instrumental to this were the staff and members of Peterchurch Youth Club, whose collaborative spirit and vision for the Golden Valley run through the work.
Commissioned by Meadow Arts as part of Our Place Golden Valley, the project celebrates creativity, local knowledge and community collaboration in rural Herefordshire.
Our Place Golden Valley is a Meadow Arts project. It is part of the Our Place Herefordshire programme funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, with match funding from Herefordshire Council and Hereford City Council.
About the artist
Grace Emily Manning & Chris Poolman
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.