Just over the hill from Oriel y Bont gallery, a meadow has grown, changed and gathered a history of its own. Shaped by people and natural processes, its grasses, stones, fossils, ants and fungi record layers of time.
For Anatomy of a Meadow, multidisciplinary artist Anne-Mie Melis collaborated with writers Simon Matthew and Mari Beynon Owen and lecturers from South Wales University to explore this landscape.
Remote sensing mapped the meadow’s three-dimensional topology, forming the basis for artworks grown with fungal mycelium. Fossils, including a 300 million-year-old stone, extend the meadow’s story into deep geological time.
The work asks us to reconsider what lies beneath our feet - how much of it has been made by us, how much has made itself, and how impossible it is to separate the two.
With support from Arts Council Wales and University of South Wales