Tumbling down the Dark Mountain

A little blog from the people at the Dark Mountain Project

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The Cover

Will you be on our next cover? We are now looking for artwork for the cover of our next Dark Mountain journal. Submissions are open until 18th May. Jess X Chen (above) worked with fellow artist, Noel'le Longhaul to create the collaborative screenprint, Emerge, Collapse, which formed the striking black and white cover for Dark Mountain 5. The diptych records "two artists' attempt to map the world buried beneath the one which they were taught was the only possible reality. Exploring the boderlands between memories of landscapes, half remembered dreams and inward experiences of fear . . ." More about Dark Mountain art and details about submissions here

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Earthly Alchemy

"Like the Earth, these images are the work of collaborations, of projects — the results of waiting and watching and movements over time. Way marks and tracks, blueprints and shifts: a map of mountains soaked by the rain, the blue zigzags of a Patagonia glacier. Each one tells a story caught in a glimpse: the story of a pilgrimage through Walthamstow, the story about a collection of plants made from abandoned technology, the story of the sun’s yearly trek across the sky in a grandmother’s house in the far north. The fabric of this world." Submissions open for artwork for Dark Mountain 6 open until 18th May. Cynotype flower from Second Nature by Louise Oates (Dark Mountain 5)

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The Fabric of This World

"Birch trees have always been there with people in Europe, as fuel, as medicine. They are one of the constants, which like roe deer, we’ll see into the future. Both have actually increased because of us and agriculture. They are two species that it’s safe and important to form a relationship with. So much of nature is in drama and disappearance, it is good to know there are some things we can count on." From blog about the artworks in the just-published Dark Mountain: Issue 5 and an interview with artist and forager, Thomas Keyes, http://dark-mountain.net/blog/the-fabric-of-this-world/ Art submissions for Dark Mountain 6 still open. Deadline 18th May. Send to [email protected] Following the Roe to Bennachie by Thomas Keyes www.thomaskeyes.co.uk

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the bestiary show

Sheffield-based street artist Phlegm opened his first ever gallery show at Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch on Saturday, the first of February. The Bestiary is a non-commercial exhibition arranged as a collection of his old and new characters:some presented in jars on the shelves, and some placed in the middle of action, or in their 'natural' habitat. Don't miss (ends 4th March).

Photo credit by Marcus Peel.

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dark mountain kitchen

Lovely illustration by Danish artist Signe Kjær.from the current post on the Dark Mountain blog, Being Pioneers.

These illustrations appear in Andrea Hejlskov’s book Og Den Store Flugt about living in the wild woods in Sweden.

Uncivilised illustrator? do get in touch with [email protected]

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feral imagination

Finding something wild and unexpected in the city. Portland Road squirrel and acorn by artists Boe and Irony who paint giant urban birds and animals (raven, pigeon, magpie and fox) on the walls of North London. Visual contributions to Dark Mountain 5 are now welcome ([email protected]). Deadline 6th January 2014.

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#unciv

Dark Mountain call out: We're also looking for some great images of the four Uncivilisation Festivals for a photo retrospective in book five. If you were there in 2010-13 and caught the moment, do get in touch. [email protected].

Reading and installation at the recent The Gifting by Warren Draper The Telling and The Gifting are Dark Mountain-inspired events in Doncaster, led by Warren Draper and Rachel Horne.

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Cover in blue

Dark Mountain books have so far been coloured ivory and emerald, crimson and gold, deep purple and peat brown. One colour that hasn't appeared yet on the shelves is blue: indigo, azure, ultramarine, sky blue, ocean blue, mountain blue .. . .(here in primary force from an exhibition of Frans Widerberg's luminous paintings). Cover submissions in blue (and all other colours) for Dark Mountain 5 are now welcome. Please send to [email protected]. Horse and Rider by Frans Widerberg. New overview on the visionary painter from Oslo out next March (SkiraRizzoli). Text by Michael Tucker and Holger Kofoed, Introduction by Frans Widerberg.

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Cover story

We're in search of a great new cover for our fifth collection to be published in April. Covers can be abstract or figurative, but have to contain one essential element: a mountain! All submissions to [email protected]. Petermann Ranges by Elton Wirri Tjungurrayi www.ngurart.com.au

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From 'Charnel House for Roadkill', by Dougie Strang; an installation making its debut at this year's Uncivilisation festival

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It struck me that both Knight and Dalton were part of a tradition, if one could call it that, of voluntary exclusion from the exalted trajectory of progress on which humanity finds itself. They were living in a manner which has been common to all people, in all places, for most of our existence as humans on this earth. They have found a level of comfort, a way of being, with which many of us are familiar: the silence of being in large woods, the grace with which we move when outdoors, unhurried, for some time.

Ian Hill on the Thoreau of Lakeland. Read the full story on the Dark Mountain blog.

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To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death, which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology...

Galway Kinnell, from 'The Fundamental Project of Technology'. Find more techno-critiques in the latest Dark Mountain book

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The Green Old Road by Cat-Art

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Writers are not silent, strange creatures, who live in a small room, tapping away at a machine ... The writer is the one who can boldly stand up and speak out, so that the world can hear another language being spoken, far kinder and wilder than the dominant broadcast of Empire.

Charlotte Du Cann on the role of writers in dark times. From the Uncivilisation festival blog.

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Reports from a Hawaiian volcano, dispatches from the tribal areas of India, conversations with primitivist philosophers, short stories told from the point of view of animals, poems about Abbey and Neruda, talking forests, wolf moons, life cairns and witch bottles … somehow it all hangs together as it was never intended to and yet seemed made to.

The contents of the newly-published Dark Mountain book 4. Delve deeper here.

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Usually we must go to the mountain; very occasionally, the Mountain comes to us. Dark Mountain is perambulant towards public (un)consciousness. In the terrain of ecological ideas and challenge, she might turn up just about anywhere.

Poet Mario Petrucci on why Dark Mountain matters to him. (Don't take his word for it, though - check out the From Our Books section.)

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I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

From Robinson Jeffers, 'Rearmament', 1935. Via the Dark Mountain Project