Views from Absent Mountain is a concrete poem in the form of an accordion book with interlocking pages and covers of hand-painted newspaper collage. It is the first artist’s book in a small series about the Covid-19 pandemic, loosely based on ancient Chinese Mountain poems of the T’ang period.

The mountain peak featured in the cover collages of this book is Greater Ararat, part of the snow-capped and dormant compound volcano of Mount Ararat, and the highest peak in Turkey and the Armenian Highland.

Views from Absent Mountain was written in London, where there are no mountains, as summer turned to autumn in 2020. Begun during the first lockdown in the UK, it focuses on the early experience of the pandemic as a health crisis and the societal shifts that resulted. It was completed on the day the UK passed one million confirmed coronavirus cases, and another national lockdown was announced in England.

I felt an unusually strong sense of placement at this time, living in isolated conditions in a usually busy city, while reading stories about developments in the pandemic across local, national, and international news. This odd feeling combined a sense of extreme disconnection with a contradictory experience of the pandemic as a collective crisis, as I remained aware of its profound and continually unfolding effects across the world. When I learned that many people who lived in or near the countryside were coping with lockdowns and social distancing by spending more time in their natural surroundings, this seemed like a perfect way of reconciling these feelings. However, there wasn’t an opportunity to do this in the city.

One of the ways I found myself responding to this situation was by rereading some of my favourite rivers-and-mountains poems of ancient China, and particularly poets of the T’ang Dynasty, such as Meng Chiao and Liu Tsung-yüan. This period of Chinese history (618-907 CE) is remembered as an age in which great reforms and cultural advancements gave way to political corruption, crisis, and an uprising known as the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763 CE), which devastated the country. However, this period was also characterised by artistic richness, as seen in the work of poets such as Meng and Liu, and the transformative approaches that their changing circumstances prompted them to embrace.

In his book Mountain Home, David Hinton describes the archetypal scenario in the rivers-and-mountains tradition of Chinese poetry as “giving up the empty pursuit of professional ambition and returning home to the more spiritually fulfilling life of a recluse in the mountains.” In the cultural context of ancient China, this was not an act of escapism or sentimentality, but the spiritual cultivation of wilderness according to traditional Taoist cosmology, which “recognises earth to be a boundless generative organism, and this vision gives rise to a very different experience of the world.” Hinton accordingly characterises such a departure as a return “to a life in which the perpetual unfolding of Lao Tzu’s organic cosmology is the very texture of daily experience”, and in which poetry “articulates a profound and spiritual sense of belonging to a wilderness of truly awesome dimensions”.

My initial artist’s books in this series have particularly been based on the works of Meng Chiao, due to his transformative approach to poetry as a means of generating new experiences. Views from Absent Mountain is particularly inspired by Meng’s poems ‘Autumn Thoughts’ and ‘Laments of the Gorges’. These 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, Views from Absent Mountain (2020)

Details:
Book measures approximately 7.1 x 20.8 x 0.6 cm (closed). As each book is handmade, dimensions may vary slightly.
7 unnumbered pages, assembled in interlocking structure.
Edition of 4.
An artist’s book by Jennie Cole. Made in London, 2020.

Construction:
Covers of hand-painted newspaper collage on 250gsm pink card.
Inner pages digitally printed and hand-painted in acrylic paint on 250gsm pink card.
Supplied in a protective transparent plastic sleeve.

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