Festial

I've noticed that contemporary art often seems to highlight gritty urban themes, while rurally-based work seems to fall into a few well-worn areas like agriculture/science, nature/culture or botany/sex. I guess one of my aims for Festial is to do something different. I hope it will no less challenging or shocking than the grittiest urban art. But I'd also like it to be spare and thoughtful. Not dry or remote, not a historical re-enactment, not a worthy-but-predictable 'heritage' project. Can I do it? Watch this space!

One of the hazards of the journey will be the uncertainty I feel over how to handle the religious side of things. I hope I will discover how medieval Christianity and paganism interact and/or conflict with each other – and that will inevitably involve an exploration of my own views, beliefs, hopes and fears as much as an exploration of anything which might be objectified as being outside of the self.

Religion is still a difficult area, I know. Even in this secular society. Even after Tracey Emin's jaw-dropping lack of compromise, after Damien Hirst's cut-up animals, after Jake and Dinos Chapman's vision of hell, after that enormous portrait of Myra Hindley created from the handprints of children.

In 2005 I made an installation for the annual open application contemporary art exhibition at Salthouse Church in Norfolk. Hinting at the links between the Bronze Age barrow cemetery on the adjacent Salthouse Heath and the medieval church, I collected plant material and made 'incense', which I scattered in and around a censer which I placed on a pillowcase. In medieval times, incense would have been burned routinely in that very church. But when the vicar came round to vet the work (yes, the vicar, even though the church was to all intents and purposes a contemporary gallery for the duration), he baulked at the title incense. The work was allowed to stay, but was retitled rite, and the list of materials had to speak for itself.

I've shown the churchwardens examples of my previous work and they are happy to let me go ahead with the project. In fact, they seem keen. But do they really know what they are letting themselves in for? What if there are boundaries that I unwittingly transgress and then end up fuming that it is just 'ridiculous' (if only to myself and my long-suffering partner!) if the church people don't like it?

I'm preparing for my first feast day in St Andrew's church, Wood Dalling. Before that, I think a small launch party will be in order after all the work that's gone into planning the project and securing Grants for the Arts funding. I'm thinking medieval sweetmeats and ale. Oh yes, definitely ale.

By the end of the year's residency I expect to know St Andrews' interior and exterior intimately – I might even have given individual names to the highly vocal ducks (and moorhens) who inhabit the large pond in front of the church. Not to mention the barn owl who seems to live somewhere round the back.

Already, Trevor and I cycle up to the church quite frequently and wander, breathing in the dust that dances in the sunlight; the cobwebs strung from pew to pew that festoon the poppyheads; significant moments in countless lives absorbed by the stone, flint, plaster and wood and continuously exhaled – a gentle exhalation.