Tag: art
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Foregathered wi’ the beast
I am standing in a lay-by of the A9, 2 miles north of Brora. I am face to face, for the first time, with a stone that I encountered a photograph of a year earlier, in a book about the wondrous wildlife of Scotland. Paving slabs ascend the bank to a hefty lump of granite…
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Hildaland
Hildaland is a hidden island, said to rise in the mist between two tides. When spotted by a sailor, they had to sail towards it without taking their eyes off it, for if they did it would vanish. There have been very few sightings of vanishing islands in recent years, however few have been looking….
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Rewilding the Exhibition
When artist Beatrice Searle approached me about co-curating an exhibition and symposium responding to the rewilding movement, I was struck by the potential richness of the topic. I had only met Beatrice once, to chat about her project For the Journey and Return, which I had written about for a magazine. Since then, we have…
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Join The Learned Pig!
The Learned Pig is looking for two new section editors to take a lead as we expand and adapt our editorial offering over the course of 2019. Each new section editor will take charge of one editorial thread and help to shape its direction. Currently these are art, thinking, nature, writing, but we will be…
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Scrub
Beyond the chain-link fence of my primary school, across the alleyway into town, was a land of fascination. We called it the ‘waste ground’ and I’d wander there looking for treasures among the broken fireplaces and scuffed concrete. Garden survivors rose from the cracks and dust: snapdragons, evening primrose, mullein. This was suburban south-west London….
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The Land Incanted
The words “incanted” and “enchanted” share the same etymological root. An incantation is defined as “the use of spells or verbal charms spoken or sung as a part of a ritual of magic” also “a written or recited formula of words designed to produce a particular effect” To walk out into any wilderness; to become…
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Clouting
December It takes two years off their life, if they have lambs when they’re shearlings, if they’re going to live on the fells. Not much of the thin wintery daylight filters through the half-open door, and the straw on the floor lends a glow to the place. The barn is chilly and has…
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Wild City Manifesto
the wild city is only the past repeating * wildness doesn’t begin or end at the edge of the city * the wild doesn’t shut at 10pm * wild things have their own sequence * bring back the seasons! * our material existence cannot be sustained without wildness * the wild city reverses destiny…
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Editorial: Radical Landscapes
Radical Landscapes takes its title from Harriet Tarlo’s seminal collection of British ecopoetries The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) – a collection that came out in the penultimate year of my PhD devoted to Reading and Writing with a Tree: Practising “Nature Writing” as Enquiry, which was itself a radical,…
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love poetry: the slug edit
I offer words of love to water, and to the place where it emerges, streams, out of the earth. One small book (precious), A Little Treasury of Love Lyrics – 1963, 79 pages, Pictorial pale blue dust jacket over red cloth boards, is lain on the moss bank, beside the stream — by the sermon-spilling…
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Space Shifters
The smell of engine oil lingers sharply in my nostrils, hours after I have left the vertiginous room of Richard Wilson’s 20:50, the final coup de théâtre in the Hayward Gallery’s Space Shifters exhibition. My mind keeps returning to the glassy, treacherous surface of the oil, which fills the room to half-way up the wall…