“We imagine the ancient world in hard materials like we imagine the second world war in black and white.”
Quote from Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Women’s Work - The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
Fossils in the chalk explores the evolution of thought through material. Imagining the structure of thought and ideas through history as sea crustaceans, compounded into the strata of our collective consciousness. Embedded in the chalk are seams of flint, each unique in shape. Formed slowly, as silica seeped into pockets of air and around sea fossils in the chalk bed.
Flint, is frequently viewed as one of our first tools, and material extracted and manipulated for use as a weapon essential to our survival and cognitive development. Here, I ask what is left to the other side of that story, in the complexity and evolution of human life and spirit. The soft materials, and understanding of the skills and coordination needed to create such objects, such as listening, presence, perception and choice.
This two year residency examines the transition of ideas throughout time and the structural and systemic issues embedded into our daily experience and interactions, through long-form modes of collective learning best described as “soft research” which values intangible cultural knowledge, developed through casual and inquisitive day to day exchange and presence. Exploring how ideas echo and reverberate throughout time and place, and how creative processing and collective experience can create the conditions for the evolution of seemingly static and rigid ideas.
Set within the context of Pepys Community Hub, and at this time, the residency asks us to question how we learn, record and receive information. Whose story is told, and how? What impact does that have on the lived reality of our experience? What agency do we have as individuals and as a collective? Situating change as something that does not just happen to us, but something we are all active and conscious participants of.
This is the first creative residency at Pepys Community Hub. Through this work we hope to lay the foundation for long-term, community-led, intergenerational creative activity and learning. With a wish of using this experience to create sustainable opportunities for the next generation of local young people and creative practitioners.
This installation and research forms part of 60 years of the Pepys Estate: What a Palava exhibition and wider displays at Pepys Community Hub. Running between 18th July and 18th of November 2026. Open as a participatory exhibition, including photography, painting, video, sound recording, and installation. Throughout the exhibition we will be inviting further contributions, recollections and feedback as we collectively recall and reimagine the area and its history.
Contributions from Arthur Torrington, Alice Devine & Nick Allen, Antonia Beard, Chris Holley, Douglas Bousquet, Ian & Janet Dunning, Ken Thomas, Lee West, Malcolm Cadman, Maria Clara Calixto Andrade, Sarah Garrod, Shiroma Ratne, Sonke Prigge, Steve Burden, Steve Hammond, ReMiSo - the band.
Special thanks to the team at Pepys Community Hub. Exhibition photography by Lee Arucci.
Pepys Community Hub, based in an 17th-century naval building on the Foreshore. The community centre helps local residents access essential services, mental health and well-being. Serving Deptford and beyond by fostering community connections through food support, education, culture, and social events—continuing the area’s legacy of resilience, creativity, and activism in the face of inequality.