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A Work for the North Atlantic

To conclude ATLAS’ year-long project A Work for the North Atlantic, ATLAS has commissioned artist Richard Skelton, to respond to Bethan Huws’ film Singing for the Sea, and the landscape that formed its temporary backcloth when we screened it in Skye Sailing Club in 2016.

Huws’ film documents a group of eight female Bulgarian singers performing traditional songs on Sugar Sands, Northumberland, on the coast of the North Sea.

As Siôn Parkinson, artist, singer and producer wrote in an essay exploring the links between Huws’ work and Skye:

“In its re-orientated presentation in a boathouse overlooking Portree harbour in the Isle of Skye, Huws’ artwork speaks to a contemporary context of displacement, as well as to a historical one specific to the Highlands. For it echoes the migrants’ call of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who sailed from the Isle of Skye across the ocean to America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In turning its attention from the east to west, from the North Sea to the Atlantic, Huws’ film presents us with a question concerning the mutability of our own sense of belonging and nationhood. And so from a village south of Sofia to a shore on the edge of England to an island on the northwestern extremity of Europe, here the work finds new resonance.”
— Siôn Parkinson

Skelton’s work is informed by landscape, evolving from sustained immersion in specific environments and deep, wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, ecology and geology, folklore and myth.

Undertaking two research trips to Skye, Skelton has explored archive material, recorded a plethora of sounds including a Gaelic mass, and worked with musicians Decker Forrest (pipes & whistle), Hector MacInnes (accordion, guitar & singer), Ronan Martin (fiddle), Christine Primrose (singer) and Frances Wilkins (concertina).

August 2016 — August 2017

A Work for the North Atlantic is a year-long programme which encompasses; an installation of Bethan Huws’ film Singing for the Sea at the Skye Sailing Club in partnership with London-based art organisation, Artangel, a new artwork commission by visual artist, composer and musician, Richard Skelton, and schools’ workshops in collaboration with Aldeburgh Music’s international singing project, Friday Afternoons.

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