News from Answering Mountain is a poem of text and image in the form of a hand-painted flag book. It is the second artist’s book in a small series about the Covid-19 pandemic, loosely based on ancient Chinese Mountain poems of the T’ang period.

News from Answering Mountain was written in London, where there are no mountains, during the transition from autumn to winter in 2021. The book that preceded it was written between summer and autumn of 2020, and focused on the early experience of the pandemic as a health crisis, while News from Answering Mountain is more concerned with the political turmoil and socioeconomic problems developing in the UK as the pandemic continued. The pamphlet-stitched pages at the front and back of the book describe how these issues unfolded during this period. Between them is a poem of image and text that responds to these events, spread across the flags and facing pages.

The mountain featured across the covers, inner pages and flags of this book is the active stratovolcano Mount St. Helens, shown erupting on 22 July 1980, following its major explosive eruption on 18 May of the same year, often viewed as the most disastrous volcanic event in US history. The repetition and fragmentation in this sequence of images echoes the experience of living through the pandemic, traces of which are also represented by the collaged newsprint on the covers of the book, largely subsumed by painting into the image of the erupting mountain. This sequence of images becomes dramatically fragmented and spatialised across the flags that span the peaks of the concertina spine, creating the impression of an expanding ash cloud at the centre of News from Answering Mountain, with text from the centre of the poem dispersed throughout it. This conveys a sense of particulate matter spreading through air, as the book structure enables a spatial treatment of the mountain image along with the poetic text, supplementing its articulation of the struggle to breathe and survive.

I started making this series of artist’s books in 2020, with an accordion book of concrete poetry and newsprint-collaged images of Greater Ararat, titled Views from Absent Mountain, working from my home in London during the first national lockdown in the UK.

My initial books in this series were based on poems by Meng Chiao, due to his transformative approach to poetry as a means of generating new experiences. His poems convey scenes of transcendent beauty, punctuated by the presence of spirits, strange natural forms, and poignant images of decay. Their tone of mournful introspection is typically marked by a sense of vastness and peril, and intimations of order unravelling.

Jennie Cole, News from Answering Mountain (2021)

Details:
Book measures approximately 11 x 11 x 2 cm (at spine). As each book is handmade, dimensions may vary slightly.
12 numbered pages in pamphlet-stitched sections at front and end, digitally-printed in colour, sewn in black linen thread.
4 double-sided rows of digitally-printed and hand-painted flags in centre.
Edition of 30.
An artist’s book by Jennie Cole. Made in London, 2021.

Construction:
Covers of hand-painted and lino-printed newspaper collage, pasted onto book board.
Accordion spine and flag cores of 120gsm black card.
Inner pages and flag surfaces digitally printed and hand-painted on 90gsm paper.
Supplied in a protective transparent plastic sleeve.

News from Answering Mountain features in private and public collections including special collections at Wellcome Collection (London, UK), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (UK), London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (UK), and Cardiff Metropolitan University Library (UK).

News from Answering Mountain can also be viewed on the MCBA Prize website.

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