In 1916, towards the end of what has been celebrated as their high modernist period, Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston, an isolated eighteenth-century farmhouse in East Sussex with no modern amenities. Facing ‘east with its shoulder to the South Downs’ and with a northerly view over the Weald, the house is a sunlit painters’ paradise in the summer but weathers harsh winters. They arrived in autumn just as the weather broke, seeking farm work as conscientious objectors. Despite initial privations, they revelled in the enormous creative potential and social liberation afforded by this isolated Sussex farmhouse and maintained this rural home for the rest of their lives. Together with their extensive cast of family and friends, the artists wove a domestic fabric that drew on local landscapes and traditions, combined with cosmopolitan philosophies and artefacts from their life in London and travel abroad. Charleston is now open to the public as a house museum, testifying to the idiosyncratic, resourceful and provocative living it harboured. A scenic hike from the house over the layers of human and natural history embedded in the chalk Downs brings visitors to the church in nearby Berwick, whose murals were painted by Bell and Grant in the 1940s. This chapter argues that these rural church murals are not a betrayal of Bell and Grant's earlier metropolitan, high modernist radicalism but rather boundary-pushing and meaningful contributions to modernity and late modernism that adjust our gaze from the urban and universal, to the rural and particular.

Key to realisation of the radical potential of the rural to facilitate meaningful artistic encounters is the seemingly contradictory nature of the Berwick Church murals project. The rural and religious have been positioned as the conservative opposition of modernism, modernity and liberal subcultures. Yet what the mural project and others like it clearly show is that communal rural practice, staged away from galleries and the art market, has the capacity to produce significant work resistant to conventional high modernist narratives of the new and of the solo genius. These murals offer fresh and personal yet historically situated ways to engage with enduring human aspirations to cultivate and commemorate belonging within communities rooted in time and place.