Story
GEM Eco Studio is an artisan and experimental natural dye and bespoke craft studio based in Birmingham, England.
Working with plant symbolism and their inherent virtues to create meaningful pieces. Our intention is to infuse cloth with nature's rich emotion, history and story.
The magic lies in breathing, or rather crafting, life into matter. Aging, adding history, character and story to give an object a past and a sentience. A form of animism. It's this sensibility that makes our work unique in feeling which comes across to both live audiences and on screen.
From a young age GEM Eco Studio founder,
Grace Emily Manning, used nature to craft her fantasy worlds beginning with fairytale houses built at the bottom of trees.
Everything grew from there…
“I naturally became an animator as I have a mind for seeing spirit in all matter, the organic and seemingly inanimate. My first experimental animations were handcrafted with found natural materials; skins, seeds, roots and raw fibres.
After completing my course in Experimental Animation at The Royal College of Art I moved to Birmingham and started working for my brother’s gardening business.
As a gardener I was outdoors more than ever, between hedgerows and garden beds, scooping up soil and seeds, identifying plants and pulling weeds. Gardening offered more opportunities to collect and work with raw natural materials.
Becoming more hands on with nature daily cultivated my experimentation with making materials from organic sources. Foraging locally and taking green waste from clients gardens to use in ambitious plant dye and prop making projects.
With the help and expertise of my brother GEM Eco Studio grew from the shed in our back garden in Kings Heath, Birmingham.
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I started working with natural dyes, inks and paint as a way to infuse the landscape into the fabric of the story. In each project I choose materials that are authentic to both the location and period of the story as best as possible.
For example using apple bark to dye wool for an 18th century drama partly set in Tottenham as apples were in abundance in the area at that time. I also chose other heritage dye plants and vegetables that evoke the period such as willow bark, smoke bush, red cabbage and onion skin.
After completing my course in Experimental Animation at The Royal College of Art I moved to Birmingham and started working for my brother’s gardening business.
As a gardener I was outdoors more than ever, between hedgerows and garden beds, scooping up soil and seeds, identifying plants and pulling weeds. Gardening offered more opportunities to collect and work with raw natural materials.
Becoming more hands on with nature daily cultivated my experimentation with making materials from organic sources. Foraging locally and taking green waste from clients gardens to use in ambitious plant dye and prop making projects.
With the help and expertise of my brother GEM Eco Studio grew from the shed in our back garden in Kings Heath, Birmingham.
I started working with natural dyes, inks and paint as a way to infuse the landscape into the fabric of the story. In each project I choose materials that are authentic to both the location and period of the story as best as possible.
For example using apple bark to dye wool for an 18th century drama partly set in Tottenham as apples were in abundance in the area at that time. I also chose other heritage dye plants and vegetables that evoke the period such as willow bark, smoke bush, red cabbage and onion skin.
I am developing the studio to work in a solutions based way that challenges us to create natural dyes and art materials, engage with heritage crafts and create regenerative bio-based alternatives to synthetic materials like bioplastics, and introduce them to the Performance Design industries wherever possible.”
Grace Emily Manning - GEM
Grace Emily Manning - GEM
