The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • Euclid’s First Definition

    Euclid’s First Definition

        Cover image: Euclid, Stoicheia (Elements). Manuscript, Constantinople, September 888. MS. D’Orville 301, fols. 113v-114r © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (via Alain R. Truong)    

  • from ‘swims’

    from ‘swims’

    swims is a long poem documenting wild swims across the UK. swims starts and end in Devon, my home county, moving through Somerset, Surrey, the Lake District, London, Wales and Brighton. Each swim is conceived of as an environmental action, testing ways individuals might effect environmental change. swims is an overall sequence of twelve swims,…

  • The Couple on the Corner

    The Couple on the Corner

    On the corner of St Michael’s Church, Bryngwyn, a couple are fixed together in mortar. They are lying horizontally, one on the east wall, one on the south. Their heads meet at the edge. At some point in the many buildings and re-buildings of this church they have come to be a quoin. Now, as…

  • Reliquiae

    Reliquiae

    If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a text is therefore as much a result of material history – and chance – as it is of any inherent truth or beauty. Nonetheless, the…

  • I, The Thing in the Margins

    I, The Thing in the Margins

    It’s the sound that provides the first clue of something amiss. The loud, low growl of audio feedback fills a room already awash with bright green glare. Sitting upright in a shabby armchair is an inscrutable figure. Both feet rest evenly on the ground. Both arms rest evenly on the chair. Its head is turned…

  • Bloom

    Bloom

    Where to do plants belong? At the bottom of the food chain? At the centre of the world? In a pot? In the garden? Growing wild across moors and mountains, railways and roads… In Ben Cave’s book Bloom, plants are depicted both in states of careful order, neatly aligned in vases or jugs, and out…

  • The New Concrete

    The New Concrete

    The history of concrete poetry charts a path from utopia to dystopia. You could say that there’s a secret history of the second half of the twentieth century embedded in this little movement, one that parallels larger changes across cultural output. By the late 1970s, when concrete poetry collapses into a smouldering heap, few could…

  • A Pervert’s Guide to the Apocalypse

    A Pervert’s Guide to the Apocalypse

    The bold white title reads “Cool Photos”. I dutifully open the email to find yet another link to yet another photo essay from yet another intrepid, probably amateur photographer who has schlepped their medium format through the crumbling halls of Detroit. Or was it Pripyat again? Or some (now) generic computer generated image of the…

  • On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    On a Headland of Lava Beside You

    Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…

  • The Death of a Beautiful Subject

    The Death of a Beautiful Subject

    The Death of a Beautiful Subject is a multidisciplinary project by artist Sophy Rickett, which takes as its starting point a series of butterfly photographs taken by the artist’s father. As in previous projects, Rickett examines issues around collaboration and ownership, and encounters between humans, each other, and the natural world. Quiet and poignant and…

  • The Barometer of My Heart

    The Barometer of My Heart

    On 20th February 2002, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, philosopher Jacques Derrida asked an audience of students the following question: “The phallus, I mean, the phallos, is it proper to man?” This question opened the eighth session of a series of lectures given by Derrida between 2001 and…