The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Essex

  • Points of Departure – Estuary 2016

    Points of Departure – Estuary 2016

    I love the fact that on the coast you can just travel along the edge until the next place. Knowing the way stops becoming an issue even though it isn’t always clear exactly where you are. Everything is continuous. The day that the summer finally breaks into thousands of tiny points of grey drizzle I…

  • Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School

    Fungi are unusual. They are easier to define through a process of elimination, by identifying what they are not. They are not animal, mineral or vegetable, but ‘fruiting bodies’, strange forms of life growing out of decay, with their own fecund vocabulary: hymenium, volva, universal veil, inner veil, sporangium, spore, apocethium. Since beginning my artist…

  • The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex

    Harwich has a split personality. At the northeasternmost point of Essex, the old town is still laid out as the medieval port it once was, but it’s separated from the cranes at Harwich International Port situated a mile up the Stour river. For centuries it was a key access point to Europe: a “gateway”, when…

  • Shorelines Festival 2013

    Shorelines Festival 2013

    The perennial danger of the small town literary festival is that it takes place solely within the confines of a conference centre / tent / town hall or other academic / municipal space. However well-advertised, accessible (geographically, financially) and welcoming, there is always then a potential for division between inside and outside. This becomes pronounced…