Sam Haile (1909-1948) was an active member of the Surrealist movement in London from 1937 - 1939, and Earth Processes was one of several works created by Haile in the early months of 1939, inspired by hospitals or operating theatres. The oils also included 'Clinical Examination' (dated 11. i. 39), 'Brain Operation' (dated 16. i. 39.), and Surgical Ward ('24. ii. 39), now in the collection of the Tate Gallery.

The images of pain and suffering in these works were often acute and disturbingly vivid, with nerves exposed in tense vegetable systems. And yet within such images there is - as Haile's friend, Charles Seward observed - a 'poetic sense of wonder and mystery, a sense of the revelation of 'deep-guarded secrets', which hint at least at the forces by which man can sustain his agonies and survive them'. He continued to write that the brilliant directness and economy of Haile's painting 'is nowhere better seen than in the oils of 1939' (…) The execution is often of the greatest delicacy and elegance of line; the contour often beautiful'.

This painting was executed shortly before Haile emigrated to America at the outbreak of the Second World War. Many of his paintings were lost or destroyed during this move, and others in a fatal car accident that the artist suffered in 1948, at the age of just 38. A total of only twelve canvases by the artist remain today, with over half of them already in museum collections.