In 2021 I started making work for an exhibition in this church. I began to see a link between my practice and the walls of this church. For a decade or more I had been setting images and rusted metal into plaster blocks. These blocks had a similar material quality to the walls of the church. The wall painting was once part of something much larger, that larger part still exists but has been buried under layers of plaster and limewash. I thought that something else exists within these walls, a human presence, not visible, but present. Moisture from our speech, our hands and heads, carrying our DNA, circulating in currents and setting into the wall surface. I read a journal about Fetal microchimerism, the discovery that cells within a baby live on within the mother long after childbirth. Another instance of a human presence being embedded without it being visible. I wanted to work on this idea of human traces being present within material. Increasingly, I felt that the material was enough in itself to communicate this idea and that I no longer needed drawings or photographs.

I responded to a commission to make a cross for St Agnes Church in Cawston. The brutality of her experience, the vulnerability of holding beliefs contrary to state power led me to dig a mould out of the earth in my garden. I wanted to connect with how persecuted people need to whisper and conceal their thoughts and beliefs or face the consequences , like Agnes. Once again, I felt that the imagery and ideas I was searching for already exists, close to hand. I thought about the generations of people who have come to Hall Road in search of the healing properties of spa water and medicinal leeching. Every day I walk up and down Hall Road.  I began paying closer attention to the springs and spas and the leech pond that exist along the road. The practice of digging a cross out of the earth made me think about soil and how else I could use it. I felt that by using the earth around the leech pond and the water from the springs I could connect with the potential of the material to carry some of its historic purpose, to heal and restore. I started to fix the leech pond soil to the wall pieces, the human presence, embedded within the wall, being offered some balm, an opportunity to heal.

Matt Phelps