Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer

Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer

Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer are Dartmoor-based musicians and artists who work together on music, performance and creative projects rooted in landscape, ancestry and ritual. They live with their family in a traditional longhouse on Dartmoor in southwest England and have worked there for over fifteen years. Their work draws on the moorland around them, as well as on travels and collaborations in other cultures and places, including northern ice, desert regions, island mountains and western seas.

Nigel Shaw

Nigel Shaw is a composer, musician, wood carver and traditional flute-maker. He makes many of the instruments he uses in performance and recording, and has spent many years handcrafting flutes from woods native to Britain, including yew, holly, thorn, ash and oak. His music combines ancient instruments such as handmade wooden and clay flutes, whistles, recorders, smallpipes, dulcimer, psaltery and Eastern European overtone flutes including the fujara and koncovka, with drums, percussion, field recordings, piano, harmonium and synthesisers. The result is a blend of older and newer sounds, with material ranging from meditative and melodic work to dance music with tribal rhythms.

He also carves large wooden masks and totems inspired by the wild landscape. One of his most ambitious projects is a ceremonial Neolithic and Bronze Age-style roundhouse built from granite, oak trees and rye grass thatch. This structure and a set of flutes carved from thirteen native trees sit at the centre of DARTMOOR ROUNDHOUSE, a cycle of flute songs recorded at night around the hearth fire.

His recordings include the improvised meditation album THE RIVER and REQUIEM: WELL OF SOULS, a work for classical voice and lament. He also works in more rhythm-driven projects, including the bands RIVEN, GLOBAL and DUBBLEHEAD, the last of which explores dub and reggae improvisation. He initiates and produces sacred world music projects such as BAMBOO CEDAR OAK, bringing together Japanese, Tarascan and English flute players, and the album ANCESTORS, built around forgotten songs of tribal people from the Siberian Arctic. He also works on EXILE, which brings together world and ancient folk influences.

Carolyn Hillyer

Carolyn Hillyer is a composer, singer, performer, painter, drum-maker and writer. Her songs and chants focus on ancient spirit, hidden memory, ancestral roots and the lives and experiences of women. She performs with drums as well as voice, and makes many of the instruments she uses, including traditional frame drums and ceremonial drums made from materials sourced on Dartmoor and during journeys to the Arctic. These include red deer, horse, reindeer, elk, salmon, horned, paddle and death drums.

She has released eleven albums, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with Nigel Shaw. Her work includes WEATHERED EDGE, HOUSE OF THE WEAVERS, CAVE OF ELDERS, which presents improvised wordless songs, and DRUM SONGS FROM THE HEATHEN HILLS, which focuses on voice and drum. Songs from her albums are sung by others in chanting groups and dancing circles. Her collaborative work with Nigel in the RIVEN, GLOBAL, ANCESTOR and EXILE projects shows a more expansive approach to voice and lyrics.

As a visual artist, she paints life-size images of archetypal and mythological women, the cycles of womanhood and the sacred landscape in human form. Her paintings are shown in installations that relate to ancestral land, including THE NORTHERN SISTERHOOD OF DRUMS, which combines a life-size council of ancestral grandmothers with ceremonial drums and other shamanic totems around a sacred winter house or northern lavo. She also writes mythic stories that expand on the symbolism in her paintings and songs, and some of these writings appear in published collections and source books in the UK and Europe.

For more than thirteen years, she leads workshop journeys based on these themes, from inclusive celebrations of ancestry and pagan spirit to intensive weekends for women at her farm on Dartmoor, where participants explore creativity and spiritual life.

Work together

Shaw and Hillyer are internationally known and have performed in Japan, the USA, Russia, Australia, the Arctic, the Baltic States, Jamaica, Central America, and throughout Europe and the UK. They also organise RIVENSTONE, an intimate festival of sacred world music and ancestral roots held on their Dartmoor farm every few years.