The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Category: Art

  • Do Not Touch the Artworks

    Do Not Touch the Artworks

    From 1938-9 and for a period of over fifteen months, a cleaner at The British Museum set to work on the Parthenon Marbles. Using cooper tools, the worker began to clean the marble figures and friezes, believing their bisque-like façade to be unwanted dirt. All manner of scandal, disciplinary action and juridical affairs ensued, with…

  • Dirty Dozen

    Dirty Dozen

    Dirty Dozen is a series of photographs with all the dirt, dust, specs and scratches left on the negatives to be visible after scanning. The aim is to explore the intricate dialogue between process and subject and between what is acceptable and unacceptable in photographic process. When displayed online against a pure white background, it…

  • Surface Tension

    Surface Tension

    Surface Tension is a project investigating life, pollution and biodiversity on the River Lea using photography and sound. Focusing on the blurrings of the natural and unnatural, clean and unclean, built and self-willed in a Lea Valley landscape that is constantly being rewritten and remade, the photographs here were taken on 120 film, and the…

  • From the Foreshore

    From the Foreshore

    This March sees an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Sophie Charalambous hosted by curator and gallerist Jessica Carlisle. The works on show capture the strange energy of the Thames foreshore – a place of washed out tones and washed up objects. Timeless characters pick through the sedimentary layers of history; silver and black flows past…

  • A View from the Other Side

    A View from the Other Side

    Spot-lit in the cavernous darkness, a model of a city. A model city: monotone, empty, pure, with the pristine edges of laser-cut steel glinting under light. It sits in the centre of an oil-black moat. The whole is perched waist-high on a slowly rotating table. Like many architectural models, the piece feels both large and…

  • The Waldorf Project, Chapter II: Colour

    The Waldorf Project, Chapter II: Colour

    “Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.” Kahlil Gibran   Colour perception. First noted by Aristotle, later defined by Newton: the spectrum of visible light interacting with sensors on the human eye. That is all. Yet, in his work on colour theory, Goethe…

  • Beauty and Revolution / A Token of Concrete Affection

    Beauty and Revolution / A Token of Concrete Affection

    Now is the time to visit Cambridge if you’re a fan of concrete poetry. At Kettle’s Yard is Beauty and Revolution, an exhibition of work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, while the Centre of Latin American Studies plays host to a group exhibition entitled A Token of Concrete Affection. Both are furnished from the private collection…

  • Chasing Suns

    Chasing Suns

    The arc of the sun across the sky is one of the most enduring images: repeated every day for all to see. And yet, each time it’s a little different, varying according to geographical location, visibility, and time of year. Chasing Suns is an ongoing long-term photographic project by artist Pauline Woolley. The images were…

  • Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….

  • Here From Now

    Here From Now

    The history of landscape is at the same time a history of art. The eighteenth-century emergence of the picturesque was, as the name suggests, as much a response to painting as it was a response to nature. Land art blossomed as we realised the extent to which we had reformed the surface of the earth:…

  • Lost in Fathoms

    Lost in Fathoms

    Stumbling dim across the surface of the earth: humanity. Our legacy not culture or religion or science, but ruin. Our lasting traces that of footprints, not brain waves. Is this what makes us unique? A geological force in our own right? Certainly this is the view announced in 2012 at the 34th International Geological Congress…