Richard Skelton and
Autumn Richardson 

16 January - 14 March 2015

This exhibition continues on from the show at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, and gatheres together a selection of Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton's Cumbrian work for the first time, including music, texts, artefacts and editions.

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 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.