The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • In pictures: Objects designed for pigs

    In pictures: Objects designed for pigs

    Popcorn Piñata         Pig Kerplunk     Melon Mines     House of Many Doors     Fruit Machine     Apple Barrel         This is part of CARNEVALE, a collaborative art-science project that explores animal welfare questions and the enthusiasm of pigs for investigative play. Click to see…

  • Finley Styles

    Finley Styles

    Conceptual artist, painter and writer, Finley Styles, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England on August 15, 1972. The son of market-trader parents, Styles proved academically gifted despite a shoddy school attendance record. From the age of twelve, he would regularly skip high school and, later, 6th form college to look after his parents’ market stall,…

  • The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static

    I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…

  • Rethinking Mythogeography

    Rethinking Mythogeography

    I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…

  • Keep the Ink Moving

    Keep the Ink Moving

    The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds we inhabit: not only the mundane technologies of contemporary existence (the overhead crackle of electricity cables, the whirr of the motorway, the view through the…

  • Natural Selection

    Natural Selection

    Freud would have loved this exhibition. Ostensibly Natural Selection – a collaboration between artist Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist Peter Holden – is about birds, nests and eggs. It’s actually about art, sex and death. As a philosophy undergraduate I was lucky enough be taught by the phenomenologist Dermot Moran. Phenomenology, he explained in…

  • On Time and Mess

    On Time and Mess

      Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple. – Robert Rauschenberg     Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to put it mildly, upon the regulation and control of grammar and correct spelling, in the final preparations for the publication of my book, ‘I fear…

  • The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

    The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

    Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in psychology, Jungian ideas and the power of mythology. Victoria Rance’s latest exhibition, The Night Horse and The Holy Baboon, at The Cello Factory Waterloo, was…

  • Of Shadows

    Of Shadows

    One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Effigies, pentacles, masks and charms. Robes and blades, crosses and cauldrons. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, is a treasure trove of magical objects and books dedicated to the history of British folk magic and other forms of popular spiritual belief. Photographer…

  • INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN

    INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN

    Epigenetic Memory in the Spruce Tree Foresti covers 37% of Norway’s combined area, almost half of which is made up by the tree species called Norway spruce. The rest consists of mostly pine and birch. It is therefore only natural that spruce forests should feature so heavily on black metal album covers and lyrics. The…

  • The CleanMeat Revolution

    The CleanMeat Revolution

    In The Box Gallery at the heart of We The Curious – Bristol’s centre for science and technology – is David Lisser’s exhibition, ‘The CleanMeat Revolution’. From the vantage point of a fictional future, the exhibition looks back at the period around 2030–2080. The show presents artefacts excavated from an imagined past, documentation of protests…