New exhibitions at the Grosvenor Museum

Two new exhibitions open in June at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester exploring local landscapes; Catherine Taylor Parry ‘Earth Stories: Plwm/Lead’ and ‘Echoes of Ancient Lands and Seas: Fossils from Cheshire’.

Earth Stories: Plwm/Lead

7th June to 27th September 2026, in the museum’s Coins Gallery.

The exhibition will explore the ways in which objects and their material properties are transformed by time, nature and physical forces. The artworks have been developed and created through the artist’s interest in the history of lead mining and the extraction of stone on Halkyn Mountain, Flintshire, North Wales.  The work, in 2D and 3D, uses colour, texture and form to respond to the ways materials are changed physically through natural decay and erosion. It embraces the intrinsic and tactile qualities of materials in the creation of the artworks.

Artist Catherine Taylor Parry is based in North Wales. With landscape as her starting point, she developed her practice to research the connection between the environment and human activity, as well as the links between art materials and their visceral properties. She has an MA with distinction in Fine Art from Chester University and has exhibited in solo and group shows across the UK. She was a prize winner in the Grosvenor Museum’s 2025 Open Art Exhibition.

Echoes of Ancient Lands and Seas: Fossils from Cheshire

20th June to 20th September, in Gallery 2.

Did you know that Cheshire used to be a jungle? And then a desert, and then a deep, deep ocean?

The exhibition explores the geological history of Cheshire and its surrounding areas, from the Carboniferous age (359 million years ago) to the present day. Discover Cheshire’s ancient environments and the strange and unusual creatures that inhabited them, featuring fossils from the Grosvenor Museum’s collection to show how scientists know these environments existed.

Highlights include beautifully preserved plant and fern remains from the Carboniferous jungles of Wrexham, marine microfossils from Saltney, and the fossilised footprints of ancient reptiles from the Wirral. Visitors will learn how Cheshire’s famous salt deposits formed, how the salt industry has shaped the regional heritage, and how industrialisation has accelerated climate change in the present day.

What do the future landscapes of Cheshire look like? Will we be flooded by oceans, or reclaimed by desert sands? Will temperatures rise beyond those of the early Jurassic, or is another Ice Age on its way? Or will the future look like something we’ve never seen before?

The exhibition will also feature artworks by Val Hunt: an artist who uses recycled materials to create incredible sculptural works of endangered and extinct animals, flora, dinosaurs, exotic birds, and fish.

Val has produced a sculpture of a horsetail fern specially for the exhibition. Val Hunt’s website: 

https://www.arthunt.co.uk/

The curator of the exhibition, Harriet Williams is a PhD student from the University of Liverpool and Curatorial Intern at the Grosvenor Museum. She is a geologist and palaeobiologist with a particular interest in vertebrate morphology. Harriet has spent the last three months on placement at the Grosvenor Museum, researching and cataloguing the museum’s extensive fossil collection.

The Grosvenor Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.30am to 5pm and Sunday, 1pm to 4pm. Closed on Monday, but open on Bank Holiday Mondays. Entry is free but donations are welcome.