THE FELLING PLACE
12 March - 11 April 2026
Lud’s Church by Andrew Michael Hurley
“Lud’s Church” is a natural chasm in the remote, gritstone moorland between Buxton and Leek in the north of England. Though it is only a hundred metres long and eighteen metres deep, it is a strange and atmospheric place, and many stories are associated with it. Robin Hood is said to have taken refuge there. And it was where John Wycliffe’s Lollards held their heretical assemblies out of sight of the Catholic authorities. One of them, a Walter de Ludank, gives the crevasse its name.
But, most notable of all, is the connection with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Scholars of the fourteenth century poem offer Lud’s Church as a possible location for the “Green Chapel”, in which Gawain meets the eponymous knight in order to uphold the bargain the two of them struck the previous Christmastime. During a contest of bravery at King Arthur’s court, the Green Knight allows Gawain to cut off his head. A year and a day later, Gawain, bound by the laws of chivalry, must allow the Green Knight to do the same to him.
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Descending the uneven steps into the hollow, feels more like entering a crypt than a church. The air is cold and damp, even potentially unhealthy for being trapped in this crevice. The towering walls of gritstone are furred with glistening moss and every fissure in the rock blooms with hart’s tongue or spleenwort; hardy ferns that thrive in these dark, dank clefts.
It’s too closed-in here for echoes and so there is almost silence apart from the drip of water. It’s hard not to feel conspicuous. In fact, it’s hard not to think of the place as a lair. A single rotting glove lies discarded in the bracken. An old boot is half buried in the sludge. The muddy floor is criss-crossed with the prints of feet and dogs, slurred by slipping, as if previous visitors have been carried off into the deeper parts of the gorge.
When Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel, he thinks it the sort of place in which the Devil might conduct a black mass. Since it already feels so much like a tomb, it seems an appropriate setting for death. Yet, he is spared the lethal blow from the Green Knight’s axe, and if there is a fatality, then it is symbolic. Gawain the boy, Gawain the innocent (Gawain the green) dies, and in his place grows Gawain the wise. By holding his nerve and acknowledging his capacity for deceit, he leaves the grotto with the mental and physical marks of experience. It is spiritual growth by ordeal.
And so, the (ever) Green Chapel is a site of death and rebirth. It is both wound and womb, grave and grove. Nature is humankind’s enduring allegory of hope. In it, we see transformations not endings.
Standing here in Lud’s Church on the second of March, everything seems wintry with the world, but somewhere above me I can hear a bird singing. The first skylark of spring.
Lancashire, England. March 2026.
Artist Statement
The Felling Place is a foray into eco-horror and plant horror: sub-genres that arise from our fractured relationship with the natural world and might be characterised by narratives where nature is not only sentient but malevolent. In these narratives plant life may strike back at humans and horror comes from our terrifying encounter with ‘monstrous’ vegetation.
The new work draws particular inspiration from David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight, adapted from the anonymously penned fourteenth century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The narrative centres on a bargain the titular and otherworldly Knight makes with Gawain – a bizarre duel in which the Green Knight invites his challenger to “try with honour to land a blow against me”, with the proviso that one year hence the Knight will return the blow in-kind. In an act of hubris, Gawain beheads the Knight, who then simply picks up his head and rides away. His parting words confirm that he expects to see Gawain in a year to accept the return blow. This literary trope, which has since become known as ‘the beheading game’, lies at the core of this body of work.
The tone of the poem is one of adventure and knightly honour, but Lowery’s adaptation amplifies the horror of this ‘playful’ bargain, presenting Gawain as a flawed individual and the Green Knight as a terrifying and elemental force of nature. A strong sense of foreboding and unease pervades the film stemming from Gawain’s physical and emotional journey to the Green Chapel - the site of the endgame - and the persistent threat of beheading, an act which both tops and tails the story.
I am fascinated by the way the film repositions a medieval chivalric romance as a tale of human frailty and existential dread. Importantly, it transpires that the Green Chapel is not the stone building Gawain expects, but an overgrown ruin in a forest where the Green Knight waits, seemingly in a deep sleep and literally rooted to the ground. Gawain has come full circle, dragging his imperfect head to the chapel to meet his fate.
My work brings an eco-horror reading to this adaptation wherein the Green Knight is the personification of a vengeful nature come to challenge the warmongering humans with an axe - their preferred weapon of choice for ecocide. Whereas Gawain may indeed lose his head, the Knight is able to reattach his, demonstrating a plant-like resilience to the lopping of a limb, and signifying nature’s endurance as part of a cycle of growth, death, and regrowth. Humans, by contrast, must face up to their frailty in the face of ecological disaster.
My work conflates the motif of beheading with tree felling, drawing attention to both the absent (human) head and the absent canopy of the tree. In this series neck-sized sliced tree stumps are ‘dressed’ in moss green jacquard fabrics with elaborately shaped collars suggestive of roots, tendrils, leaves, and oozing or spurting blood. The mossy fabric is intended as a direct link to the symbolic function of green in both the film and the poem: green in this context represents the spectacle of thriving nature alongside the insidious horror of creeping vegetation.
Where previously I have utilised modified scythes and pitchforks, this work employs the axe, noting its role in both beheading and tree felling. Anchoring the suite of works are two axes welded together at the point of violent contact yet sheathed and haloed in green jacquard. For me this work is a summation of the tussle between Gawain and the Green Knight and a reminder that the clash between humans and nature is nothing new.