Swanscombe Peninsula 
Kent, 2018


Grace’s work in response to the climate crisis was showcased at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the London Design Festival 2021, she has made work for Disney, Glastonbury Festival, The Royal Opera House,  ITV and Channel 4 productions.

Artist CV

Exhibitions
RCA 2020 June 2022
Swansula, Relics of Estuarine Magic
Bargehouse, OXO Tower

THE PLASTIC AGE Terra Attune CIC
November 2021
The Hidden Gardens, Glasgow, Scotland

EMERGING DESIGNERS SHOWCASE
London Design Festival September 2021
Victoria and Albert Museum

CETUS June 2022
Sculpture Garden, The Park
Glastonbury Festival. June 2021,
St. Issey Primary School, Cornwall.
June 2021, Crowdfunder HQ, Newquay. October 2020 - Present,
On permenant display at Trevisker Garden Centre, Padstow.

SWANSULA, July 2020
Royal College of Art. Digital Show.

NACRE, RED NACRE Aug-Sep 2019
Bloomsbury Design Gallery, London

RED LIST MOTHER June 2019
Glastonbury Festival, Somerset

NUCLEATIONS: LAID OF THE GRAVID
May 2018
Art Hub Gallery, London

OVERVIEW Apr 2017
Bloomsbury Design Gallery, London

TALE OF PUPA 2014
Screening, Whitechapel Gallery, London


All work and images © Grace Emily Manning 2023


‘The emotions of a place are paced by the scientist in her, but uttered by the powerful visual language she uses to birth the stories we urgently need to action’  - Matéria Cíclica


Grace Emily Manning b. 1992 is an artist from suburban London, growing up on the banks of the River Thames in North West Kent. The estuarine landscape, where industry and nature meet, provided endless solace and inspiration for her work.

Spending her formative years combining the shingle beaches, picking up waste materials to reimagine.

Grace is from a working class background and appreciates her art practice as a process of awakening to herself, a practice to express her pure spirit and a method of healing and attuning to nature.

-
Grace’s multidisciplinary practice is environmentally driven, highly experimental, alchemical and surrealist at heart. Weaving together drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, animation, installation, writing and performance work into expansive worldbuilding, site-specific projects. The projects move from fieldwork to fantasy and are crafted with a rich sense of materiality and tactility.

Grace holds an MA in Experimental Animation from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Performance Design and Practice from Central Saint Martins, which provides her fine artwork with a foundation of spacial design, interdisciplinary work, collaboration and the wide range of design and craft skills necessary to create cohesive other worlds.

 -                                       
Grace’s practice is drawn from landscapes and places. Her ideas are infused with detailed research into a location's history, folklore and ecology. Grace uses found objects and natural materials found in the landscapes to create sculpture, craft new stories, build fantasies and offer alternate realities for the lands.

These materials are used also to create natural, site-specific art materials and new sustainable Future Materials for the work.

All charged through a powerfully rich imagination.

Grace founded GEM Eco Studio in 2022 to house her prop making and fabric dyeing projects made for Stage and Screen, Installations and Exhibitions.

Creating natural dyes, inks, stains and other non-toxic art materials from nature to introduce into the performance industries.
                                       
-
In 2016 she received the Sally Goldsworthy Bursary Award from Discover Children's Story Centre, going on to become a facilitator for Art and Animation workshops for young people.

She is currently a director of Arts based Social Enterprise Terra Attune CIC. Making art materials from nature and running craft workshops with communities in North Cornwall. Building collaborations with other environmentally driven grassroots organisations such as Beach Guardian CIC.


Beach Guardian workshop with St Merryn School, Padstow 2021