Memorious Earth
‘soil of echoes’
Between 2010 and 2015, Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton produced a series of collaborative artworks, publications and editions about the upland landscapes of south-western Cumbria, in northern England. Key to their work has been the development of the list-poem, which, at its most fundamental, magnifies the act of attention and the facility of language – through naming – to refer to things, places, to life itself. The texts they assemble frequently contain material drawn from a variety of 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.
‘Their work is minutely attentive to the specificities of the gone and the will-be-gone. Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.’
Robert Macfarlane (The Guardian)