The Giving Way finds itself, disoriented, in the ‘cold narrow vaults of the world’ — those now-silent caves that hold the residues of Palaeolithic human mark-making. In these subterranean spaces questions echo and reverberate, begetting others and still others about the isness and itness of being; of life, death and their umbral shadows, and the passing of forms from plant and animal and human, each ‘becoming tabula rasa for the next’. The pamphlet is illustrated by the artist’s own collages, which gather like the scatter of flint debitage around a long-cold Ice Age hearth.

Richard Skelton is a British artist whose work focuses on landscape and other-than-human studies. His books include Landings (Sustain-Release, 2009), Limnology (Corbel Stone Press, 2012), Beyond the Fell Wall (Little Toller Books, 2015) and Stranger in the Mask of a Deer (Penned in the Margins, 2021). He is co-director of Corbel Stone Press with Canadian poet Autumn Richardson, with whom he edits Reliquiae, the biannual journal of eco-poetics and esoteric literature.

(Author photo by Autumn Richardson)

ISBN 978-1-913749-24-8 / 32 pages / 184 x 140mm / Printed on Mohawk Superfine with Gmund Bier cover and Savile Row end papers.

Pamphlet