I ought to tell you, the cow is my favourite picture. This probably comes as no surprise to you. It’s as if I’ve held out my hand and you’ve placed the cow inside it. I can feel its weight against my skin. There’s sensuality in every photograph, every work, of yours, but here it is so deliberate. I’d put this cow on the cover of my gay magazine, if I had one. All is announced in it. The fucked-up arable, the human-animal relationship that requires a queer gaze to cut it loose, free. – K Patrick

‘I’m always making one thing’, says Skaer, whose assertion is upheld by the structure of this book: a space that contains her various sensibilities on pages partitioned, like rooms or chambers, by the walls of singleword chapter headings. An abbreviated index, these nine words might well serve to categorise all her art and many of its stones. See, for instance, FONTS and SENTENCES to study the grammar of sculpture that is as cultured and elemental as a rock tool. In several images, we see just the artist’s hand wielding one of her sculptures as if it could be used to do something. Obviously. Look under ROCKS to see boulders on beaches, pebbly shores, the stoney desert fossil of an ocean that receded long ago, and the sheer cliffs of the sea that show us where, and before, we began. – Ingrid Schaffner

This book has been conceived as a moment in time. The sculptures that appear in its pages have been rephotographed to allow them to exist anew in book form, alongside recent photographs of surroundings, events and landscapes from the artist’s life. These images were then given to two writers to respond to directly. What emerges is ‘a space that contains her various sensibilities on pages partitioned, like rooms or chambers’, now receding in time.

Contributions by Ingrid Schaffner and K Patrick.

Lucy Skaer lives on the Isle of Lewis. She is an artist who works with sculpture, film, print and drawing. Her work slows ideas down to abstractions and makes them concrete.