Our twenty-eighth issue is a full-colour special issue on uncivilised art, celebrating the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world.
This spring a team of editors set out to create a collection of visual art that would act as a retrospective, a catalogue of the many genres our books have showcased since 2010: photography, illustration, graphic literature, calligraphy, painting, sculpture, land-based artworks, making, installation, ritual and performance. A collection of artwork that included written testimony, practice, interview, memoir and prose poem. We wanted it to be a celebration of the artists who hold out for a certain way of being in this collapsing world: true to the transformative power of creativity, to the love of the Earth, and the material of life itself.
What happens shift your attention away from the shiny surfaces of industrial culture, to a perception of the world co-created with all planetary beings who dwell in deep time? What happens when you follow the artists as they span dimensions, move through the land, disturbing and liberating our vision?
You find yourself in a book in the shape of a tree: leading from the forest canopy to the heartwood to the seeds of the future that lie on the leafy floor. You edge across branches that take you back in time to the illuminative script makers, or down into the underbelly of civilisation where women fall into holes, subvert road signs, throw paint, walk across mined and burning land. You descend into the roots, the core mycelial practices these artists hold in times of unravelling: collaborations with lichen, with microbes, with stalks of wheat, mountain slate, seaweed, horse and crow; in the studio which is a darkroom, and also a cliff, a river, a desk before a luminous window.
You look up…
You can read the full editorial ‘Thinking Like a Forest’ here. To order your copy see below.
Our Latest Issue
Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)
Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.
Our online edition
The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy our newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our bi-annual books or our weekly online edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available either in print (Issues 19, 21-23, 26-28) or as PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!