The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield

    The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield

    Holding her hair over the sink, the water runs red; it trickles down her temple. It gets on lunch’s dirty plates. The towels are black, the floor beige. Don’t touch your head, you’ll get pink fingers! Put these gloves on, and just comb it out whilst I finish off Emma’s fringe. It splashes. Hair fragments…

  • Editorial: Clean Unclean

    Editorial: Clean Unclean

    My side of the desk is scrupulously clean. The other half is a mess of dust and papers, temporarily abandoned books, a pair of tights, a lump of local granite. The line that separates the two is not as clear as I’d like. From the other side, my wife’s stately, slender Mac spaceship turns its…

  • 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…

  • Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible

    Multiverses 263-396: Another Worlds iz Possible

    After John Bell, Momus, Heisenberg, Jonathan Swift, I Ching, Calvino, and Shrodinger   Multiverse 263 The Multiverse in which multiplication is always exponential across galaxies. For every status update posted on Facebook, another two are posted in alternative Multiverses.   Multiverse 264 The Multiverse in which falsifiability has been banished. All knowledge in Multiverse 264…

  • 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….

  • 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…

  • Reimagining the British Witch

    Reimagining the British Witch

    My first encounter with the works of Hayley Potter was in 2008, and the Secret Creature project: a diverse melange of strange, semi-believable owl-sheep-cat-bat-birds that flocked together in the branches of a community tree and peered out at you myopically. Since then her work has developed and her subjects proliferated. She has worked for a…

  • Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)

    Oikeusjuttu (The Trial)

    In Finland, the wolf is both more and less than an animal; it is a symbol. And this November sees a court case in which the very nature of that symbolism will be on trial. Fifteen men have been accused of the 2013 killing of three wolves (three of a population of around 150) in…