Dark Mountain: Issue 26 – Dark Ocean

Our Autumn 2024 issue is a full-colour exploration of the world’s oceans in an era of collapse – in narrative, verse, art and photography.

Front cover: Red Cornetfish (Fistularia petimba) from the series ‘Life As We Have Known It: Sea’ by David Ellingsen

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…

You can order your copy of Dark Ocean here