Into the Wyld: A Transformative Journey to the Green Chapel in the Staffordshire Peaks

In preparation for our forthcoming exhibition, artists of the Material Matters Collective embarked on a journey into the wilds of the Staffordshire Peak District.

‘And overgrowen with gresse in glodes aywhere; and al was holw inwith, nobot an old cave, or a crevisse of an old cragge – he couthe hit noght deme with spelle’.

Having been led to this place by a 14th century text, our journey so quickly out of the city to such a remote and hidden corner of England was healing – but the effect of the landscape that unfolded before us was transformative. We had been certain of our destination yet totally unprepared for the reality of what we encountered.

You can only drive so far, the rest can only be reached on foot. At each stage of our pilgrimage we felt the steps of the Gawain poet alongside us: a fording of a river, steep banks of trees, the eerie laughing of a Green Woodpecker, the distant call of a Cuckoo.

At Lud’s Church we collectively paused, and asked for a kind of invitation to enter.

Perhaps we had expected to have a brief look, take a few photos and leave. But hours passed.. each element of this remarkable place connected with us individually and collectively in powerful ways.

The familiarity of the tale helped us to read the terrain like a manuscript, each aspect of its unique environment suggested the possibility of new ideas for our work or establish deeper connections with the text.

Only at the end of the session did we realise that the key photos we had wished to create of each other had also inadvertently captured the famous profiles of Gawain and the Green Knight lurking in the rock feature behind. We felt this was a kind of affirmation.

As a group we hope that the art which emerges from our exploration of such an a seemingly anachronistic poem gives the text justice. We also wish for an exhibition that will add to the future canon of works inspired by this most ‘gentylest knyght of lote‘.

We headed off to the pub. Strange to drink in The Ship Inn, so far from the Mersey, but it was excellent and we toasted Gawain.

This strange, enchanting tale is woven with the real and the imagined. Many scholars and artists have attempted to map Sir Gawain’s literal and metaphysical journey, and we shall also do this in our show. The facts are established however in the poem’s origination in the North West of England and by an author who was familiar with its landscape.

‘We! Lorde’ quoth the gentyle knyght, Whether this be the grene chapelle?’

Having now experienced this magical place, we were left in no doubt as to the answer to this question.

Into the Wyld opens at the Williamson on the 1st August 2024.