According to Roland Barthes, the event of grief gives way to an absence that paradoxically fills us. “We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.” The oxymoron of becoming full with emptiness. The hollows fill with more empty space. When Richard Skelton lost his wife in 2004, he began to process the tragedy by composing music. He filled the empty spaces with sound. At that time he also returned to his parents’ home in Wigan, where, in his own words, he was “reconnecting with a sense of that childhood wonder, completely refracted through the prism of grief”.
Born in the UK and most recently based in Ireland, Skelton is a multidisciplinary artist: a musician, poet, filmmaker, and writer. He resolves to bury his ghosts and then exhume them,…