Dusking III marks the turning of another year with a performance by Lucy Wright and the Rushcart Crew, featuring the mobile sculpture, ‘Add to (Rush)cart’ and staged at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.

Inspired by the Lancashire folk customs associated with ‘rushbearing’—the gathering of Juncaceae rushes in late summer to insulate churches for the winter, and in particular, by the towering rushcarts historically built in working-class communities as part of the Wakes Week mill holidays—the sculpture now wears a darker mantle and is pulled by a team of nine women wearing matching pyjama costumes.

The soundtrack by Ben&Sel, featuring Wright on vocals and jaw harp, takes as its starting point the well-known song ‘Sumer is Icumen In’—one of the two oldest secular songs in the English language, popularly sung on 1 May to mark the onset of summer. Recast as a winter song, the melody and lyrics are first played forwards, then backwards, as if to reverse the season itself.

In the second part of the film, the women take up heavy burlap sacks—a recurring motif in Wright’s Dusking performances—and hurl them rhymically at the ground as if to extinguish the light. They then stand in the twilight holding sparklers and watch as they burn out.