Landings

Richard Skelton is an artist from northern England. Since 2005 he has produced a series of musical recordings and books that engage with the hidden histories and ecologies of specific landscapes. Landings is a collection of texts for the West Pennine Moors of Lancashire, UK, drawn from various sources, including historical treatises, maps, parish records, census data and the artist’s own diaries, notebooks and essays. The book obliquely documents his use of music, writing and photography as means of ‘colluding’ with the various agencies of the land: the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard, the ‘real’ and the imaginary, the living and the dead. Originally published in 2009 as a modest 96-page book, Landings has grown over the ensuing years as it attempts to record, transcribe and archive the voices of the here and now, the lost and forgotten.