Kate Morrell

Alpine Spoilers was acquired by the Tate Gallery.

Alpine Spoilers appropriates text from the collection of mountaineering memoirs, in The Fell & Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District archives, held in The Armitt Library. The books are first-hand accounts of journeys in The English Lakes, The Alps, The Himalayas and further afield, from Victorian times to the present day.

The book is a playful edit of quotes from the last paragraphs from over 100 books in which the author creates a poignant finale. Through the alpinist’s words, the text explores tensions between the draws of the aesthetic canons of romanticism and the real possible outcomes of pain and death. In the final pages, the author weighs the advantages of pleasure and power versus risk.

Publié à l’occasion de l’exposition Pots before words à la Gallery II, University of Bradford, UK.

This publication is a reproduction of a handwritten, re-sequenced and annotated Index for A Land, a non-fiction book by archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, first published in 1951. Produced from archival material held in The Jacquetta Hawkes Archive, Special Collections at University of Bradford, the original index was written and compiled by Jacquetta and Nicolas Hawkes.