Richard Skelton is a British artist, writer and composer. His work often evolves from sustained immersion in specific environments and wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, archaeology and geology, folklore and myth.
Between 2005 and 2011 he ran Sustain-Release, a private press dedicated to publishing his own landscape-oriented recordings and art editions. He is particularly known for his unique use of stringed instruments, many of which were highly modified in order to broaden their timbral and tonal range.
Since 2009 he has been co-director of the multi-media publishing house Corbel Stone Press, with the Canadian poet Autumn Richardson. Between 2013 and 2022 they curated the influential journal of eco-poetics and esoteric literature, Reliquiae. He is also founding member of the Notional Research Group for Cultural Artefacts, and director of the Centre for Alterity Studies.
Richard holds a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing. His doctoral research examines the relationships between humans and non-humans in Late-Upper Palaeolithic Britain. He is particularly keen to work collaboratively with researchers in other disciplines, especially archaeology, anthropology and geology.
This website gathers a thematic selection of Richard’s work from 2005 to the present.