Dark Mountain: Issue 26 – Dark Ocean

Description

Our twenty-sixth issue is a full-colour exploration of the oceans of the world in an era of collapse – in narrative, verse, art and photography.

What happens when you leave your ordinary life behind and put your attention on the vast mysterious being that surrounds our homelands in a time of disruption and loss?

Dark Ocean is a collection of essays, stories, artwork and poetry, praise song and meditation, based on last year’s Dark Mountain residency aboard a boat called Merlin in the Outer Hebrides. The highly visual edition travels from the seabed to the horizon, from birth to death, in search of beauty, memory and the transformative power of the sea.

Dark Ocean, like all Dark Mountain books, is steered by a troubling paradox: the collapse of a world we have known, and the emergence of something recollected from the ruins. Our challenge as writers and artists was to create work that holds both the peril and plunder of the ocean, as well as our love and wonder for the matrix of all life on Earth.

Our paper vessel sails out from the Atlantic, carried by currents across power lines and ghost nets, through storms and oil spills, plankton and giant squid, into the far Pacific, swimming by the foggy Californian shore, following in the wake of a Greenland shark, the song of a humpback whale, a floating coconut shell in the rising Indian Ocean, the nightmare of migrants in the Mediterranean, a dreaming of Doggerland under the North Sea, of a vanished ocean in the desert in Utah.

And a goddess who once came to the Aegean from the starry deep to teach us about love. And a selkie with eelgrass hair who speaks with you at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay…

Writers:  Paul atten Ash, Frieda Kipar Bay, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Roger Bygott, Sarah B. Cahalan, Zoë Deans, Charlotte Du Cann,  Skye Fenn, Siana Fitzjohn, Philip Webb Gregg, Mike Hembury, Dougald Hine, Erika Howsare, Jenevieve Carlyn Hughes, Sara Eliza Johnson, Erik Kennedy, Alice Kinsella, Ellen Kirkpatrick, Lawrence Lenhart, Philippa Ball Lewis , Joe Luscombe, Bo Mandeville, Alexander McMaster, Nicholas Crane Moore, Graham Murtaugh, Lance Newman, C.C. O’Hanlon, Savannah Pearson, M. Rose , Ash Sanders, Sarah Thomas, Kim Trainor, Sebastián Ureta, Jenny Vuglar, Daniel Wade, Lawrence Winkler, Dave Wynne-Jones, Cally Yeatman.

Artists:  Nick Brandt, Ian Brooks, Seb Bradshaw, Anne Campbell,  Hannah Close, Laura Copsey, Grace Crabtree,  David Ellingsen, Max Gruff,  Eileen Hall, Geraldine van Heemstra, Jim Holyoak, Allison Kendall, Ryder Kimball, Ibby Lanfear, Lucy Mu Li, Heather Lyon, Stella Marina, Sophie Miller, Michiel Pijpe. Genevieve Robertson, Robin V. Robinson,  Neil Scott  Anna Soper, Katrin Spranger, Terese Tubman,  John Weeden.

Editors: Siana Fitzjohn, Neale Inglenook, Joanna Pocock. Art and production: Charlotte Du Cann. Assistant poetry: Michael McClane.

Cover: Red Cornetfish, Fistularia petimba and Mermaid’s Purse (Skate Egg Case), Rajidae (genus unknown) from the series ‘Life as We’ve Known It: Sea’ by David Ellingsen

Dark Mountain: Issue 26 – Dark Ocean is a full-colour paperback 256 pages long, printed on FSC-certified paper.

ISBN: 978-1-8384160-8-9