*AR is the collective pseudonym of Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton. Over the past half-decade, Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton have carved out a wholly self-directed and independent niche as artists, releasing pamphlets, books, CDs and editions through their own publishing house, Corbel Stone Press.
Operating at the crossover of art, music and literature, the couple have created a deeply engaging and genuinely innovative body of work that draws together these seemingly disparate disciplines. Their work is ‘informed’ rather than ‘inspired’ by landscape. It is not impressionistic, but the result of extensive research into specific places, topographies, ecologies and histories. Pages from their book-works frequently…
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…spill with word-lists drawn from varied sources: pollen diagrams, dialect glossaries, cartographic records, archaeological tracts – but their repurposing of this material as art is deeply humane, aimed at drawing the attention towards the lost, forgotten or overlooked; it celebrates the poetry and beauty that such attention can reveal, and gently urges each of us towards a more intimate relationship with our natural surroundings.
Wolf Notes [2011]
First in a series of recordings made by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton for the Furness Fells of south-west Cumbria, UK. It focusses on the region around Devoke Water, between Eskdale and the Duddon Valley, exploring its topography, place-names and ecology.
Succession [2013]
In 2011 Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton returned to northern England from the west coast of Ireland, and began revisiting the landscape around Devoke Water, in south-western Cumbria – the place that provided the focus for their first collaborative album, Wolf Notes. Eighteen months later their new recording is a follow-up in the most literal sense, extending and developing the themes that first appeared in Wolf Notes, beginning with the piece Succession, which takes the last recording on Wolf Notes as its starting point, and ending with the piece Relics, which casts the landscape in a very different light.
The new work is particularly informed by the work of ecologists and palynologists, who, by analysing the occurrence of pollen in sediment layers, are able to construct an incredibly rich and profoundly beautiful narrative of plant succession over millennia, detailing the plant genera that slowly repopulated the post-glacial wasteland, eventually forming vast expanses of woodland before the arrival of early human settlers.
The sense created by these ecological records is of an environment in constant flux, perpetually in transition from one state to another. They also act as a reminder that the present state of the landscape is an accretion of its own pasts, deposited in skin-like layers, each sloughed in the process of transformation. The landscape therefore appears, not as a singular entity, but a multiplicity of different incarnations, each successively overlaid on the last.
Echoless [2013]
Third in a series of recordings made by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton for the Furness Fells of south-west Cumbria, UK:’Echoless’ comprises unabridged, 20-minute recordings of two compositions from the *AR album ‘Succession’.
Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves [2015]
Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves marks a stark shift in their response to environmental degradation. Their previous works (Wolf Notes, 2011; Succession, 2013) have expressed profound sadness at the ecological losses of the upland landscape of south-west Cumbria, where they have lived since 2011. They have observed the absence of deer, fell fox and wolf, whose names survive only in place-names. They have found the ghost forests of Furness in the buried pollen drifts of alder, birch and oak. The music, words and art they have created in response to these discoveries are forms of elegy, but they also offer glimmers of hope for a return – an acknowledgement that the last 2,000 years of ‘culture’ are insignificant when set against the deep time by which the land itself keeps clock.
As its title suggests, Diagrams is a departure from their previous work because, in its conception, it represents a move from simply bearing witness to direct intervention. It is a series of instructions for the return itself. It is the musical encoding of a ritual: ‘hand gestures, scents, markings’ translated into melody, tone, rhythm.
Memorious Earth [2015]
Fifth in a series of recordings made by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton for the Furness Fells of south-west Cumbria, UK:”Sympathetic resonance: a vast stringed instrument made in honour of J.F. Glidden, tuned to esoteric frequencies. Fine thread-like fibres. A holy triad: Raven’s Crag. Fox Haw. Brock Barrow. Memorious Earth. Land-music. A poultice to remove proud flesh.”