Penny Slinger

Both sacred and profane, Mountain Ecstasy is the cult book by Penny Slinger and her partner at the time, Nik Douglas. Working with found images – many from Slinger’s own collection of erotica – and poetry, the resulting book is a hyperreal celebration of the Tantric world. Unfortunately British customs did not understand the nature of the work and burnt thousands of copies of the Mountain Ecstasy book when they were entering England from the printers in the Netherlands.

"I discovered Tantric Art at an exhibition at the Hayward gallery in the early 1970s. Several years later I was able to explore this in depth with my partner, Nik Douglas. I introduced him to the medium of collage and we created the series of collages that appear in Mountain Ecstasy as a celebration of the Tantric world. Everything was both sacred and profane. Out of the confines of the house (An Exorcism) and into the wide expanses of mountain heights and the full spectrum dreamscape where nothing was taboo. It was both healing and liberating as I embraced a whole new colorful palette and used nearly all ‘found images’ rather than photographs I had taken myself. The series represented a shift from the intensely personal to the trans-personal, seeing the self in everything. It involved the alchemy of pornography, for I used many images from my collection of erotica, redefining them in a Tantric context. We added poetry and quotations to compliment the images."

- Penny Slinger