Our work with artists at Penrhyn Castle

Walker & Bromwich at Penrhyn Castle 

Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich are a collaborative artistic practice, who had access to Penrhyn Castle from late 2016, researching, creating and preparing for an exhibition that was unveiled at the castle in July 2017. Their residency formed the third and final year of the collaborative project.  

Large-scale work  

Zoe and Neil are known internationally for their sculptural works, participatory events and exhibitions that invite audiences to imagine better worlds. They create work that leads audiences to examine their relationship to the environment they inhabit and reflect on larger global situations.   

The aim of the final year of the project was to pull all the elements together, which culminated in a large-scale sculptural work based on the quarry landscape and sited within the castle. The event featured a live performative launch event with Penrhyn Male Voice Choir, workshops, discussions and community interactions. Their work had a connection to the manual labour that the castle was built on, and the Great Strike, which historically held a future legacy for workers’ rights.    

12 stories by Manon Steffan Ros  

In 2018, Penrhyn Castle launched a collection of new fictional pieces '12 Stories' by the author Manon Steffan Ros.  These fictional creations were Manon’s own response to the difficult history of the castle and its origins steeped in the Jamaican slave trade and the slate quarry industry of North Wales.  

Growing up in the community 

Growing up locally and attending secondary school in Bethesda itself, Manon experienced first-hand the deep-rooted feelings of hatred towards the castle that once was home to the Pennant family. Manon felt her own relationship to the castle to be torn, feeling an intense draw whilst also feeling a sense of guilt at the obvious opulence and difficult historical ties to the sugar plantations in Jamaica and the lives of the quarrymen of Bethesda at the turn of the 20th century.    

Stepping away from the written word  

Manon, a successful published author, presented some of the 12 stories through other mediums, including both visual and musical interpretations. A book was created to accompany the installation, which featured a model of the Keep made from sugar and embroidered quotes from passages discovered in letters from Lord Penrhyn to his plantation foremen in Jamaica.   

Luke Jerram’s Harrison’s Garden   

Harrison's Garden by renowned artist Luke Jerram was a touring installation inspired by the clock maker John Harrison who struggled for decades to make navigation at sea safer. He accomplished this by creating the most accurate clock the world had ever seen.   

Today, clocks are in almost all homes, and although we now rely on new technology, they still play an important part of our daily lives.    

For the installation at Penrhyn Castle, the clocks were placed in the derelict third floor of the Keep and grouped to form patterns and shapes along the surfaces, all set to different times so that visitors heard a musical delight of ticking, clicking and chiming throughout the day.   

How the garden grew   

Harrison's Garden travelled around the country visiting other National Trust properties including Nostell Priory, Castle Drogo and Gunby Hall and collecting more and more timepieces along the way. Before its arrival at Penrhyn Castle, people from the local community donated some of their own timepieces to the installation.  With these donations, there was an estimated 5,000 ticking clocks on show at Penrhyn Castle. The installation was later auctioned to raise money for a statue of John Harrison to be erected in his hometown of Barton upon Humber.  

Merched Chwarel 

During winter of 2019, the Stables’ workshop was taken over by a group of female artists who form Merched Chwarel.  

Marged Pendrell, Jŵls Williams, Lisa Hudson and Lindsey Colbourne along with their Curator, Jill Piercy form a group of local artists whose work is inspired by the role of women in the industrial slate mining communities of North Wales.  

Using both traditional and experimental slate working techniques they explored the unexpected qualities of slate itself by using domestic, textile and sociological processes to investigate women’s response to the landscape and legacy of quarrying. Their work provided a link to the community engagement programme of both Storiel in Bangor and the World Heritage Site Bid.