Forms of Things Lost To (2023)

‘cult of the oak
cult of the pale north
cult of the peat bodies’
(The Cult Revived, Richard Skelton)

In Skelton’s 2020 novella, And Then Gone, various kinds of interments and exhumations are performed by both seen and unseen hands, and, as the narrative progresses, there is an overlapping and obscuring of earthly and psychological terrains. Thought processes take on fluvial or terrestrial qualities, and the land itself appears alive with the trauma of its own memories.

The land in question is the Cumbrian hinterlands below the border with Scotland, a low-lying region with numerous bogs, marshes and mosses. One such location is Scaleby Moss, where, in 1845, a bog body was discovered:

‘He came to the remains of a human skeleton buried about eight or nine feet beneath the surface, and closely embedded in the lowest stratum of black peat. The skeleton was wrapped in what appears to have been the skin of a deer.’ (A Cumbrian Bog Body from Scaleby, RC Turner, CWAAS, 1988)

In the late summer of 2022, a copy of And Then Gone was buried in waterlogged soil not far from Scaleby Moss for about 3 months before being exhumed. During this interment, pages of the book became fused and overwritten. Forms of Things Lost To presents salvaged fragments from the recovered codex alongside a series of eight artworks that were painted, partially erased and repainted over the same period of time.