Richard Skelton: No Frontier
Short film, 2017
No Frontier is a short film that explores the psychological effects of travel, climate change, remoteness and isolation. Filmed on the eastern fringes of Iceland during a time when the artist had no permanent address, these motionless, lingering images mimic the stop-and-shoot superficiality of the tourist, but their subject matter – the idiosyncratic and the everyday – is entirely different from the usual tourist fare. These are images suffused with ambivalent emotions: confusion, revulsion, longing – there is a yearning for certainty and security amidst a blizzard of often indecipherable media noise (sourced from Icelandic radio, UK shipping forecasts, American TV news channels, & Youtube clips). The sense of unease is compounded by a series of captioned, first-person texts, adapted from the Poetic Edda, which essay a kind of psychological disturbance that is both deeply personal and reflective of a more widespread, cultural trauma.