Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton: Relics (Fraxinus)

Relics is a series of visual poems that conjure the ghost forests of Cumbria’s Furness Fells –now long gone but remembered in pollen drifts- a 12.000-year old alluvial record stretching all the way back to the last ice age. Relics can be thought of as a form of salvage; a dredging of the linguistic record for traces of these lost genera. Each tree is represented by a textual ‘trunk cross-section’: the innermost ring comprising its earliest linguistic form and the outermost its modern-day equivalent. The series is part of Memorious Earth, a larger body of work made over a five-year period about the ecology, flora and fauna of south-west Cumbria.

Relics (Fraxinus) (2013)
Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton
Digital print
Courtesy of the artists

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