Awoiska van der Molen, The Living Mountain, 2020

This is the third publication in which Awoiska probes deeply into the essence of the remote unspoiled natural worlds where her images are created. The book is published alongside the music composition The Living Mountain written by Thomas Larcher as composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2019-2020). The music piece draws inspiration from photographs that Awoiska made for Larcher in the mountains of his native Tirol (Austria). The monochrome landscapes are combined with reproductions of Larcher’s scores and remnants. The title for both the composition and this book is taken from Nan Shepherd’s book of poetic prose on the Cairngorms mountains that she wrote in 1942 and which was first published in 1977. Awoiska van der Molen: ‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’.