Lucy finished her A Level Art in May 2023. She made some amazing films which were shot in the church and we wanted to bring our work together for a joint exhibition. We then thought about her cousin Jack who has been turning out some ace paintings down on the south coast in Bexhill. We asked him to get involved as well. This is what we did.

My exhibition in this church in 2021 helped me clarify my thoughts about my art. The surviving section of the wall painting and the lost sections, buried beneath layers of whitewash, resonated with my practice of setting drawings, photographs and metal into plaster. What else is embodied within these walls other than the lost sections of the painting? I felt there was a possibility that the walls carried something real of us and our ancestors. Through contact DNA or through moisture from our bodies traces of us exist within these walls. This tallied with my interest in icon painting which affirms the transformation of pigment and material into a spiritual presence. This idea of materials being used in art to go beyond representation to embody a presence led me to read medical journals about Fetal microchimerism, the discovery that cells within a baby live on within the mother well beyond childbirth. That sense of embodiment, things being present, but not visible, seemed to connect with my thoughts about walls and a sense that some experiences and thoughts do not wash off, they embed themselves and leave their traces.